At a meeting in Maharashtra, Swades Foundation staff member Anand Patel sits across from a group of 20 farmers who recently started an experiment. Rather than each tending their own individual rice paddies, they work together on a 12-acre community farm with guidance from Swades Foundation, using drip irrigation to grow vegetables that fetch much higher prices than rice. While rice brings in only about $200 per acre locally, their recent harvest of bitter gourds yielded a peracre profit of about…

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Read more stories by Esha Chhabra.