Nikka Singh Aulakh of Kup Kalan village, patriarch of the Aulkah family, may be hard of hearing, but his brain is razor sharp. So when he raises his voice and booms a paean to vegetable farming, everyone tunes in. Till a year ago, a small vegetable patch was just an indulgence for this rambling joint family. Today, their five acres of veggies are big money-spinners, making wheat and paddy pale in comparison.

The Aulakhs are among the 150-odd small farmers in the Malerkotla belt who have been roped in by Growth-oriented Micro Enterprise Development (GMED) programme of US-based non-profit organisation ACDIVOCA, to supply veggies to Choupal, the ITC retail outlet in Chandigarh. The success of this business model is just a beginning for GMED, which aims at involving a million marginal farmers in the retail sector in the next five years.

Don Taylor, chief of party, GMED, says it was soon after entering India two-and-a-half years ago with the larger goal of promoting employment that they began looking at integrating small farmers in the retail chain. “Traditionally, big retailers believe that small farmers can’t supply either the bulk or quality required for retailing, but we wanted to change that mindset by introducing better farm practices among marginal farmers. We also wanted to set up a model wherein farmers produce for an assured market with minimal risk,” Taylor explains.

Last year, Taylor approached ITC Ltd, which gave its nod to the project. Today, the GMED-ITC partnership boasts three clusters at Malerkotla (Punjab), Pune (Maharashtra) and Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh). The results are mind-boggling. A GMED survey among 150 farmers at Malerkotla 15 days ago found that their production had increased by 27.8 per cent, the cost of cultivation had fallen by 12 per cent, and their income had gone up by a handsome 32 per cent. Malerkotla farmers peg their net returns from an acre of vegetables at Rs 2 lakh a year.

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