The patch of land was not large, it was undulating with short green paddy and a small house stood at one end of the field. Inside, on the uneven walls, were framed samples of paddy, each with a name. That’s what I remember most about my visit to Dadaji Khobragade’s farm in the Dalit-dominated Nanded village (Nagbid tehsil in Chandrapur district, Maharashtra) in 2001.
With an impish smile, he pointed to one of the frames and said, “I have named that one DRK, after me — Dadaji Ramaji Khobragade.” That was one of the few times I remember him smiling at all.
Khobragade, 79, passed away recently: unhappy, in debt, and poor — like most of our farmers. But during his energetic life he fought against a system that sought to take away from him the only thing he had of any value: his rice varieties and his beloved HMT.
No one can really explain why that rice, developed from a variety called Patel 3, was named after a watch. I had met Bhimrao Shinde, a large landowner, who first took the seeds from him and grew the rice which yielded prodigious quantities and had a light fragrance.
Shinde took it for sale to the market and when the buyers asked for its name he couldn’t say what it was, so, on the spur of the moment, someone named it after the popular watch HMT. The markets I visited in Nagbid tehsil had some of the best rice, but HMT was the fairest of them all — in taste and smell.
Innovative breeder
Activist Jacob Nellithanam of Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch, who has spent a lifetime visiting small villages and knows more farmers than anyone else I know, found this miraculous breeder of rice during his routine sleuthing. He urged me to write about him.
Khobragade grew Patel 3, a popular rice variety at that time and in 1983, he selected some of the plants which looked different. As farmers traditionally used to do, he selected and grew them year after year. He generously gave the seeds to the other farmers and Nagbid became quite a prosperous village with the sale of HMT rice. During his lifetime he developed nine rice varieties and some of them are now grown on vast stretches of paddy fields in the country.
At the time he started, there was no authority for registration of varieties and the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Bill, 2000, was being discussed for its lack of protective measures to farmers. When I reached his small farm, I discovered that it was not even his own. He had sold the two acres he owned to treat his son’s illness. This was his relative’s land which he was cultivating and he often had to work for daily wages. Much later in 2014, the Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar donated five acres to him.
Global acclaim
When the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) announced its annual awards, some of us helped document his life story in a small way. He won that award in 2005, which to him meant a lot but that was the first of the many he would receive, including one from former President Abdul Kalam. I last met him when he came to receive the Maharashtra Krishi Bhushan award at Raj Bhavan, suitably dressed in an impressive turban.
He would call me often to complain how life was treating him, the fact that he had no land, and how his research was hampered by lack of funds.
Despite all the awards and the recognition, Khobragade was quite broken. Though later NIF did support him with loans and with registering his varieties, he never got over the initial heartbreak when the Punjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth (PKV)’s PKV HMT rice variety was released.
In 1994, a breeder from the rice station at Sindewahi under the Vidyapeeth took five kg of HMT rice from Khobragade saying they wanted to experiment with it. Four years later, it was released as the PKV HMT variety, without getting the consent of, or even informing its original breeder.
Suddenly HMT had competition from its own kind. The new HMT yielded 40-45 quintals an acre and fetched a higher price. Khobragade felt cheated — he got nothing out of it. The university acknowledged that it had got the seeds from the Nanded-based farmer but said it had developed a purer variety as farmers cannot maintain the purity of the strain and there can be natural crossing.
A determined struggle
Undeterred by this, when I visited Khobragade, he had already selected and developed seven varieties of rice and later two more. Registrations for varieties have to be done at the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Right Authority (PPVFRA) in New Delhi. After the NIF award, and another one for his DRK variety in 2009, NIF acquired the rights for both HMT and DRK varieties in 2012. The only variety that was registered in 2012 was HMT but that too as “Dadaji HMT”, as the PKV HMT was already registered. The other variety for which NIF applied — DRK — was only registered in February 2018.
However, NIF did pay him ₹50,000 each for the registration of the two seeds, HMT and DRK, apart from loans of over ₹10 lakh to support his work from 2009 to 2012 which he repaid. He could not repay fully only the last loan of ₹3 lakh due to crop failure. The NIF did suggest a technology transfer of his rice varieties to a private company, but Khobragade was opposed to this. In 2017, Nellithanam took him to New Delhi, even though he was very ill, to revoke the authorisation given to NIF to register his varieties with the PPVFRA, on his behalf.
In 2010, Khobragade’s name appeared in the Forbes list of top seven Indian rural entrepreneurs. And though today the original HMT rice competes with other HMT varieties in the market, including one from a private company, Khobragade died without the satisfaction of owning the first variety he developed or knowing about the registration of the one he named after himself.
The writer is a senior journalist based in Maharashtra