A Story That Was Never True
“In a village, there lived a poor farmer…” “एक गाँव में एक गरीब किसान रहता था”
So many of our childhood stories began this way. It seemed harmless, just a simple line. But hidden within it was a dangerous seed—an idea planted in young minds that farmers were always poor, villages were always backward, and progress was only possible by leaving the soil for the city.
But the truth I remember is very different. My grandparents were never poor. They wore silver and gold, stored grain in abundance, and lived in homes filled with milk, curd, and butter. The village was not a place of hunger—it was abundance itself. Wealth was not money, but fertile soil, clean rivers, cattle, seeds, and community. Poverty was not our story. Poverty was a lie, written into our textbooks.
So how did that abundance turn into poverty? The answer lies not only in the market, but in the education system that rewrote our minds.
The Education That Made Us Forget
There was a time when children learned under the shade of a banyan tree. Elders told stories that carried lessons of survival, culture, and values. A child learned by planting seeds, by fetching water, by singing with harvesters in the fields. Knowledge was free, and it was deeply connected to life.
Then came the factory-school system. Culture became “folklore,” farming wisdom became “unscientific,” and tribal knowledge was dismissed as “primitive.” Suddenly, even irrelevant and alien education came at a cost. What was once free now demanded money. And for money, you have to go to the factory and the city. The circle of dependency began the moment we stopped trusting our own ways of knowing.
Seeds in the Marketplace
The clearest example of this transformation lies in seeds. The entire Green and White revolution was a trap. For centuries, farmers saved and shared seeds. They gifted them at weddings, exchanged them across villages, and guarded them like treasure. Seeds were wealth, carried forward from generation to generation.
Then came hybrids and GMO seeds. Corporations declared native seeds “unproductive.” Slowly, traditional varieties disappeared. Farmers became dependent on buying seeds each season. India has already lost more than 75% of its crop diversity in the last century, and the global seed market is now dominated by a handful of corporations.
What was once free and abundant—seeds, soil, water—was turned into dependency. And this dependency was accepted because education had already taught us that the old ways were “poor.”
But the truth of resilience lies in the old seeds. When Cyclone Phailin struck Odisha in 2013, it wasn’t corporate hybrids that saved farmers. It was the 184 varieties of flood- and salt-tolerant rice, preserved by local communities, that revived fields. Abundance was always within, waiting in the grains we were taught to abandon.
Soil: From Fertility to Exhaustion
For generations, farmers enriched their fields with cow dung, compost, and natural manure. The soil stayed alive, filled with invisible organisms that nourished crops.
But modern markets declared this “inefficient.” Urea, DAP, and chemical fertilizers became the new mantra. For a while, fields looked greener. But beneath, the soil was dying.
Between 2015–16 and 2020–21, India’s fertilizer consumption rose by 16%, crossing 590 lakh metric tonnes. Today, we are the second-largest fertilizer consumer in the world. Yet our soils are in crisis—30% of India’s land is already degraded, rivers polluted with runoff, groundwater poisoned, and the soil microbiome destroyed.
The short-term harvest came at the cost of long-term ruin.
The Circle of Dependency
The outcome was inevitable. With exhausted soils and costly seeds, villages grew less food. Now, trucks from cities bring vegetables into the same villages that once fed everyone. To buy those vegetables, families need money. To earn money, they must work in mines, factories, or migrate to cities. And once a patch of land is sold, it rarely grows food again—a mall will rise, a factory will rise, and the dependency will deepen.
This is how the farmer “became poor.” Not because he lacked abundance, but because the first city was built, the first factory rose, and the first lie was told in our schools.
Reclaiming the Story
At Swapnisthan (www.swapnisthan.org), we are not promising to reverse the world overnight. What we are saying is this: if education planted the seed of this mindset, then education must also unlearn it.
Unlearning means questioning the conditioning we grew up with. Why do we believe farmers are poor? Why do we see villages as backward? Why do we call soil wisdom “unscientific”? Why do we trust markets more than seeds in our own hands?
So, we invite you: share your memories of village abundance, your stories of seeds, your learnings under a tree or in a field. Let’s weave them back into education. Let’s challenge the lie we were told.
Because one day, I hope children will open their books and read:
“In a village, there lives a farmer.” “एक गाँव में एक किसान रहता है ”