________________
He organised groups of farmer for growing papaya and centres were created for collecting the papaya latex, the raw material for papain. Besides selling the fruit itself, the farmers now had an additional source of income in the form of the papaya latex, plus Jain had ensured a regular supply of raw material for his factory. Who could have predicted that this facility would one day become the world's largest manufacturer-exporter of papain?
On a frosty December morning in 1978, Jain landed in New York, on his first foreign trip to sell papain. Having located a hotel which he could afford ($30 with bed and breakfast), he reached a prospective customer, Mr. Jack Haim, who immediately subjected him to a grilling. "Young man," said Haim, "give me three good reasons why I should buy your papain? I don't know you.
Haven't heard of your company. What is more, from ex
perience I can tell you that I HAVE
Indians are cheats." ALWAYS HELD A lesser man might have THAT AGRICULTURE IS
been intimidated, but not
Bhavarlal Jain. He replied NOT ONLY A
staunchly, "You don't have DEPENDABLE
to know me, you have to PARTNER, BUT IS
know my product. I have
brought a sample which INDEED THE VERY
you can test and convince VEHICLE FOR OUR
yourself of its quality. As for LONG TERM
the company, you don't
have to know it because the STABILITY AND
product is going to be supPROSPERITY.
plied at less than five per
cent of the market price to NAY, OUR VERY
you at your doorstep withSURVIVAL
out any advance payment or obligation to buy. Com
ing to your observation that Indians are cheats, may I point out to you, that in effect you are saying that every sixth man walking on the face of this earth is a cheat! Every community, every country has its good and bad characters. You probably got into a wrong lane. Does that justify castigating the whole human mass of about 900 million people?"
Haim immediately apologised to Jain. Eventually the meeting ended with Haim purchasing the entire stock Jain had. Soon, Haim became Jain's number one customer.
"I am a farmer at heart. My roots will somehow and always take me to rural India," Jain believes. In 1985, so excited was he when he saw the drip irrigation system at a trade fair in Fresno, that he handed over the reins of the trading business to the rest of his family and concentrated on manufacturing drip irrigation systems in India. The foreign collaborators were
willing but not the Indian Government. The concerned bureaucrat queried, "There is no import substitution involved in your proposal because your technology saves water, but we are not importing water. Moreover, why do we need technology to distribute water?" Not disheartened by this negative response, Jain obtained the licence in 1987 and floated a public corporation, Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd. The issue was oversubscribed by over 12.5 times, an amazing feat for an unknown new entrant to the stock market.
But Jain's battle for popularising drip irrigation was far from over. The farmers proved tougher to convince than even the bureaucrats!
"We had to undertake a whole lot of exten sion activities including seminars, trade shows, demonstrations, ad campaigns. We had to invite farmers, administrators and leaders to per sonally witness the miracles a drip system could perform," Jain recalls.
In addition, study tours for about 50 progressive farmers each were organised to Israel and Australia. Similarly, board members of sugar factories and bank directors and officials were taken to the USA so they would acquire an indepth understanding of drip technology and its various benefits. Success stories and interviews of farmers from different locations growing different crops were flashed on radio as well as TV. Reporters from all prestigious publications were taken around and requested to cover the techno-commercial aspects and future of the technology. What Jain undertook was akin to a zealous mission - door to door, village to village - to popularise drip irrigation.
As luck would have it, Jain got his biggest break from the same bureaucracy that had initially scoffed at him. In 1990, the Central and State governments boosted the subsidy programme for small land-holders and the drip irrigation system now became affordable. Sales nearly doubled and kept on increasing unabated. Bhavarlal Jain had helped raise an industry where none existed. Not surprisingly, he is hailed as a promoter/pioneer of drip irrigation in the country.
A living and lasting symbol of Bhavarlal Jain's love for the rural environment is his 1000 acre R&D farm. Amid the dusty, barren hills on the outskirts of Jalgaon, lies an oasis of neatly cultivated green fields. Painstakingly set up and supervised by him personally, the farm acts as a research, development and demonstration centre, drawing over 10,000 visitors every year from all over India, as well as abroad.
Over 150,000 horticultural and agro-forestry trees have been planted during the past four years. The farm is probably the only one of its kind in the private sector.
Jain has applied bio-technology for cloning ba
VARDHAMAN 100
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