Mushroom Cultivation: Making The Most Of Cash Transfers

Mushroom Cultivation: Making The Most Of Cash Transfers

Meet Rinku Devi, the mushroom farmer.

The long winding alleys of Keshopur village in Hilsa block in Nalanda leads to Rinku Devi Enterprises. This is a perfect example of the grit and determination of Rinku Devi to emerge out of a financial crisis and make a success of it.

Rinku Devi and Pramod Kumar did not have enough land to sustain a six-member family, so the latter took up tailoring to  make ends meet. In order to improve their standard of living they decided to explore mushroom cultivation. They approached a retired professor who trained them. Just when they were about to invest in mushroom cultivation COVID-19 swept through the nation; they ended up spending all their savings through the lockdown and during the pandemic.

Project Utthan—an Oxfam India and HDFC Bank initiative—started working in Nalanda to promote and support sustainable livelihood opportunities and improves access to essential services (particularly for women) across 15 villages. The project works with the most marginalised communities to become socioeconomically empowered.

Conditional cash transfers was one of the components of the project and Rinku Devi was one of the community members who received Rs 12000 in March 2021. Armed with cash and technical knowhow of mushroom cultivation, Rinku decided to set up a 450 square feet mushroom production unit on her land.

The thatched roof unit has 600 hanging bags; they started producing oyster mushrooms. Initially they struggled a bit for a proper market but they persevered. Now they are able to produce about 150-170 kgs of mushroom a month and earn about Rs 20,000 from the sales.

“Mushroom has a huge demand from the hotels and especially during the wedding season,” says Rinku Devi. When we met Rinku at the mushroom unit, she showed us around and explained how water was sprinkled on the bags to maintain humidity and what was the right time to harvest mushrooms. Rinku Devi in many aspects is a well established entrepreneur and is working towards increasing her production.

Rinku Devi’s husband too has joined her. They have now expanded the mushroom cultivation to another 2000 square feet of their land and have started growing button mushrooms. The plan is to grow milky mushrooms during next summer.

The profits that they hope to make through mushrooms is much more than they could have made growing paddy, wheat, vegetable or any other crop on their land through the year. A back of the envelope calculation shows that if the family would have done agriculture on their 0.3 acre land instead of mushroom cultivation they would have made about Rs 70,000 in a year. The family now is earning about Rs 240,000 annually from mushroom cultivation.

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