TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2024
Frazer Andrade
RAIA: Raia is a quaint village situated around four km east from the district headquarters of Margao. As one passes by the road leading to Ráchol, through the ‘Coleam Dongor’ in Raia, one cannot miss the wizened little woman seated on a chair with a few vegetables on the table in front of her. This is Pedrina Gomes who greets every customer with a warm smile and farm-fresh produce. Pedrina sets up her small little stall every morning at 8. She then goes home for lunch at 2 pm to return at 3 pm and keeps her little stall open until 8 pm. “I began selling vegetables about 40 years ago,” she says. “It’s good that I live very close to my stall, otherwise there would have been an additional expense of travel,” adds Pedrina.
Downplaying her sales acumen, Pedrina credits her aunt Rosalina Cardozo, as the driving force behind their small business. “She is the woman behind the success you see placed here on this table,” she says. “I only assist in selling what my mother’s sister Rosalina grows in her field, sitting here along the roadside,” she adds. On striking a conversation with Rosalina, who is also in her 60’s like her niece, she shyly explains that she cultivates two pieces of land: one situated in Raia and the other in Ráchol. However, both these pieces of land are cultivated only once during the year. “We grow crops like radish (mullo), red spinach (tambdi bhaji), string beans (virvil), and white sweet potato (dovim pos-kongam) for sale, while chillies are grown in a small quantity only for home use,” she said. Rosalina is dependent only on tap water for irrigation with no other means available at her disposal, thus adding to cultivation costs. She adds that she has no one who could go door-to-door with her produce and must solely depend on sales happening at her little stall along the road. There are days when not a single bundle of vegetable is sold, rues Rosalina. The tough old farmer manages both her fields independently, without any kind of help from anyone. “Earlier, we would use dried leaf ash and goat/pig droppings as manure. The ash was first sieved using a bamboo sieve to make it free of any rubble and only then used as a manure,” explained Rosalina. “I do not use any synthetic pesticides,” she says.
Back in the day, she would use traditional bullock-driven ploughs to prepare her field for cultivation, but now due to lack of ploughing manpower and rise in expenses, she cultivates her field manually without any modern or mechanised techniques.
