Farmers in Rajasthan reap it rich from floriculture

Jaipur, Feb 13 (ANI): Capitalizing on the ensuing festive season, most of the farmers in Rajasthan's Jaipur region switch over to floriculture from traditional crops for better benefits.

For instance, these farmers have taken up floriculture instead of the traditional crop farming keeping in mind the booming flower business during the festive season.

Flowers ranging from marigolds, roses, gladiolus, tuberoses, jasmines and lilies are grown in ample quantity in Jaipur and the nearby districts.

The farmers have found the business of growing flowers to be more lucrative because of the lesser cost of inputs.

Due to the high demand in the festive season, there is a constant demand of around 50,000 kilograms of flowers per day from the Jaipur flower market.

Today over 3,400 hectares of land are being used for the floriculture in Rajasthan.

Annually, over 2500 metric tonnes of roses land up at major collection centres located in and around Jaipur, better known as the Pink City.

"Growing fruits and vegetables is a highly demanding task. Even after spending lot of time and efforts on their farming, we hardly get a proper harvest that can even recover the initial cultivation cost," said Kesho Ram, a farmer.

This is the reason why we have switched to flower production. There is a high demand of flowers especially in New Delhi," he added.

In 1992, the Rajasthan Government launched the Mega Flower Development Programme to encourage farmers to take up cut floriculture.

It was heralded with cultivation on around 800 hectares of land.

Soon, the farmers who learnt about easier and cost effective process in floriculture switched over to it.

Later, keeping a track on the steady increase in demand of flowers, the floriculture has become one of the important commercially viable propositions among agriculturists and the traders in farm produce.

"During the festive season, these flowers are sold at a much higher price. Also due to large influx of foreign tourists in the city, the flower business has risen to a great extent. We export flowers outside during the festive season. The farmers sell large quantities of flowers in the market ahead of the festive season and considerably get much better prices for their produce," noted Amit Kumar Mahendroo, a flower merchant.

The major flower growing areas in the state are Ajmer, Pushkar, Jaipur, Bharatpur, Kota and Udaipur. Pushkar is known world over for rose farming. By Lokender Singh (ANI)