For Bagasara, where holdings are small enough that a single season decides the year.
Decisions across two acres
Bagasara farms cotton and groundnut on holdings that are, for most families, very small. At that scale there is no diversification and no buffer. One crop, one season, one outcome.
When there is no margin for a mistake
Large holdings absorb a bad decision. Small ones do not. That produces extreme caution - the same seed, the same buyer, the same practice, year after year, because experimenting with a quarter of your land means risking a quarter of your income.
The caution is entirely rational and it also guarantees that nothing improves. People here are aware of that trap and generally see no way out of it, which is its own kind of weight.
What the work addresses
Finding the changes that cost nothing to try. Not new equipment or new crops, which require capital nobody has, but the decisions that are free: when to sell, who to sell to, what to do with a surplus year, whether a child continues studying.
Those are genuinely available and are usually being made by habit rather than by choice, which is where the actual opportunity sits.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati.
Frequently asked questions
- I cannot afford to take risks. Is this relevant?
- Yes, and the work starts from the decisions that carry no financial risk at all.
