How the whiff of coffee transformed the lives of Koraput’s tribals
KORAPUT: Four years ago, 45-year-old Binda Badanayak was a worried man. Life in Punjsil village in Odisha’s Koraput district always meant living in fear of Maoists, or being caught in the middle of a still raging insurgency, but there was a more immediate problem — feeding his family.
Badanayak has two acres of land under the Forest Rights Act, but the only thing he could grow were paddy and millets, earning him just ₹5,000 a year. With four young daughters, all under the age of 18, and a wife to feed, there was never enough, and he had to survive on a combination of subsistence and government ration.
Then, in 2018, Badanayak planted some coffee.
Four years and a crop cycle later, suddenly, there is now enough money for his eldest daughter to go to college.
“I got a little more than ₹36,000 in a year after selling nearly 800kg of coffee cherries that I grew on my land. It has changed my life. My daughter just finished her higher secondary education and wanted to study further. Till now I had thought I would not be able to afford it. I was afraid she would have to stay here, in the middle of the violence we have all grown up in. Now I can send her away,” said Badanayak, who lives in one of India’s poorest districts.
Badanayak was not alone. Thirty-eight other farmers from Punjsil sowed coffee cherries in the same year, each with similar yields. Together, they earned ₹4.4 lakh by selling 9.7 tonne of produce. “We had never imagined this scale of money. I, too, earned ₹33,750, selling around 750kg of coffee this year,” said Bina Jani, another villager.
Why coffee worked
A district that has long come to be synonymous with the Maoist conflict in Odisha, Koraput is one of India’s 117 aspirational districts, a term coined by the Niti Aayog for districts that have low social and economic indicators. Its geography, though, is full of lush green forests and rolling hills, most of the area 900 metres above sea level. It is, therefore, perfect for coffee.
The first coffee plantations in Koraput were started in the 1930s by the erstwhile king of the Koraput principality, Rajbahadur Rama Chandra Deo. In 1958, there was also a limited amount of plantation by the soil conservation department, because the plantations have the ability to check siltation, particularly around the Machhkund hydroelectricity project. With limited government intervention, and barely any information dissemination among farmers about its economic benefits, the scale remained low.
Decades later, in May 2017, the Koraput administration decided to form the Coffee Development Trust, aiming to turn the district into a “coffee hub” by reviving the tradition. The Tribal Development Corporation of Odisha, a state government enterprise, began the process of procuring the red coloured coffee cherries from farmers, processing them into coffee powder, and marketing it under the brand “Koraput Coffee”.
“Though tribals in Koraput had grown coffee earlier, it was in fits and starts. After the formation of Coffee Development Trust, tribals are being motivated to grow it on their forest land, or on fallow land near their villages. We tell them about the economic benefits and how we can help,” said Ashutosh Nanda, Koraput district marketing manager of the Tribal Development Cooperative Corporation of Odisha Limited (TDCCOL), an apex cooperative under the state’s SC/ST development department.
In Lauriguda village, for instance, tribal farmers are growing coffee on 34 acres of community forest given to them under the Forest Rights Act. The dense vegetation populated by acacia, jackfruit, silver oak and mango trees act as a natural shade for the Arabica variety of coffee, known for its distinct flavour and low acidity content.
“Coffee plantations are a winwin proposition for the impoverished communities of Koraput. The shade plantation needed for coffee prevents soil erosion on the sloping terrain. A number of spices and fruits grown in the plantation can also then supplement the income of farmers,” said Upendra Saha, senior liaison manager of Coffee Board in Koraput.
Overall, Koraput now boasts of over 5,000 hectares of coffee plantation, of which 2,072 hectares is grown by around 2,000 tribal farmers, district officials said. In 2011, only 400 tribals grew the crop in around 400 hectares in the district.
The government’s focus on coffee has also meant those that cultivated it in the past earn more now. Rajma Chautia of Golur village in the Maoist-affected Nandapur block said, “Earlier the soil conservation department would prod us, but it was only from the perspective of protecting the earth. Though we have been growing coffee for over a decade, we had to sell it at throwaway rates. Traders would buy from us at ₹10 to 15 per kg. For the last two years we have been getting ₹35 for each kg of coffee cherries from TDCCOL. This year, the government raised the procurement price to ₹45 a kilogram.”
In 2021, a total of 540 tonne of coffee was produced out of Koraput.
TDCCOL gives farmers saplings for free, buys the coffee cherries from the farmers’ doorsteps, de-pulps the fruit on the same night at its processing unit in Koraput, and then sun dries the seeds for 11 days. The seeds are then roasted, ground and packed before the products find their way to homes through e-commerce sites such as Amazon, or through Adisha, the state government’s retail outlet. To market the coffee, TDCCOL has also started Koraput Coffee outlets in cities such as Koraput, Puri, and Bhubaneswar, where espresso, cappuccino, café latte, black, and cold coffees are sold, using only produce from the farms in the district.
Mansi Nimbhal, managing director of TDCCOL, said the intervention of state government has led to massive increase in the income of farmers. “Before our intervention, the problem was the farmers were dependent on middlemen. There was not a lot of care that was taken in the handling of coffee plants either. Beginning 2017, we started branding the product under the name ‘Koraput Coffee’,” Nimbhal said.
Why coffee can trump Maoism
But if Koraput is now earning a name for itself for its coffee, life in the district has always had a symbiotic relationship with Maoism. For at least 20 years, its history is replete with incidents of bloodshed. In February 2004, for instance, over a thousand Maoists overran the district, attacking the office of the superintendent of police, the Koraput jail, and several other police stations, looting over 200 sophisticated weapons worth ₹50 crore from the district armoury. In April 2009, over 200 Maoist cadres attacked the warehouse of NALCO in Damanjodi, killing 11 CISF jawans and looting several quintals of explosives. More recently, in February 2017, eight jawans of the Odisha State Armed Police were killed in a landmine blast in the Sunki Ghati area of the district.
Experts believe, though, that the growth of coffee is a sign of a decreasing Maoist influence, and can indeed hasten an end to the violence. Deepak Kumar Nayak, a research associate of Delhibased think tank Institute for Conflict Management, who has done work in the area, said, “Maoists exploited the gulf between the government and tribals for several years, which meant Koraput was a big catchment area for the guerillas. Now that Maoist presence is on the wane in the district, it is natural that tribals want to be engaged in activities that will economically benefit them. If the government is seen as benevolent and pro-development in this manner, it takes away a sense of apathy that is a primary fuel for Maoist recruitment. The state should encourage more and more tribals to take up coffee plantation so that they dont join the rebels in the future.”
This is what the state government intends to do, officials said, following the example set by Andhra Pradesh, where coffee is grown over 84,000 hectares.
Over the next five years, the district has set a target of increasing the area under cultivation by tribal farmers by 5000 hectares. “We are planning to add 500 more hectares of area farmed by tribals in Koraput alone, the highest-ever growth of coffee plantation in a single year. We think that Koraput has the potential of growing the produce across 1.46 lakh hectares,” said Saha. “If we manage to do this, it will be a game-changer.”