Imphal: People in Manipur, a northeastern Indian state, use banana widely, especially for religious rituals and ceremonies. Cultivating it can make a thriving business as was shown by Mutum Naba Singh.

The 58-year-old farmer took up banana cultivation on his one-acre farm in Langthabal, a village in Imphal West, nearly two years ago.

Prior to that, Singh said he had suffered great losses from rice paddy cultivation in his low lying and flood-prone farm. He was planning to shift to some other crops when a friend gave him 250 saplings of Jahaji variety.

He has not looked back since then.

Soon, the banana saplings started to bear fruits. A banana tree usually gives 20 to 30 bunches of banana. He sells a bunch for around 100 rupees in the wholesale markets in places such as Khwairamband Keithel, Singjamei, Kongba, Wangoi, Shamurou bazaar. People from nearby villages also throng his farm to collect banana. Singh harvests twice a year.

Besides banana, he also cultivates pumpkin, peas, beans, cabbage, potatoes and other vegetables. He also dug ponds of some five feet deep inside the farm to rear fish. The ponds now have more than 4,000 fish of various varieties. He sells fish for 150 rupees to 300 rupees a kilo and earns around 70,000 rupees monthly.

He feeds fish cow dung, maize, banana leaves, grass and rice husk.

Farming is not Singh’s lone occupation. He also works as a male health worker at Primary Health Centre in nearby Langthabal Phura Makhong. “We could make a comfortable living only when I got the government job in 1980. I could support my parents and brothers with my salary,” he said.

Fourth among five daughters and four sons, Singh had to give up studies after tenth grade because of compelling poverty.

“Instead of attending school, I was engaged in field work. Sometimes, I earned for the family working as a mason, digging ditch as well as collecting fire woods from the hill,” he recalled. However, there were days they had gone hungry to bed.

Now, he can assure a decent living for his wife and children.

But that has not made him to relax. “Since childhood, my life has been full of work and struggles to make a living and the same is still going on,” he said.

He married Mutumongbi Bilashini in 1983 and they have a daughter and son now. His wife and children also support him to run the farm.

Singh also provides jobs for other villagers by engaging them in his farm.

As life’s struggle eased, Singh has turned philosophical. What people in Manipur lack is a proper work culture, he says.

“They like to have best food and wear good clothes like those in developed countries. They never introspect how these developed nations arrived at the present juncture. An economically self reliant state will be possible only when people develop good work culture. Otherwise, we will continue living like beggars,” he said.

He urges the state government to encourage agro based industries which, he asserts, would accelerate the state’s economic growth.

Such changes may take time. At the moment, marriages, festivals and religious rituals such as Lai Haraoba and shraddha have become sweeter because a distraught farmer refused to give up and went bananas over banana.

(This article first appeared in the Manipur Times on December 24, 2014.)