After leaving his village three decades ago to pursue business, Kamal Prasad Paudel of Mallaj Bhawanipani, Jaljala Rural Municipality–4, Parbat, has now returned to his birthplace and revived his abandoned farmland through vegetable farming.
At a time when people are increasingly migrating from villages to cities and abroad in search of better facilities and opportunities, the 55-year-old Paudel has moved back from the marketplace to his village and started commercial vegetable farming.
“In 1993, we left our home, land, and farming and moved to Beni Bazaar,” he said. “I did business in Beni for 20 years. I worked for nearly 12 years in different cities in India and Nepal. When things didn’t turn out as I had hoped, I returned to the village and started vegetable farming.”
Paudel has managed four ropani of his ancestral sloped land for cultivation. What used to be overgrown with shrubs until last year is now green with cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli plantations. With access to roads, transportation, irrigation, and market facilities, Paudel sees great potential in vegetable farming. Vehicles passing on the road next to his field transport the vegetables to Beni, the district headquarters of Myagdi. From Beni, the produce is also sold up to Mustang. He says there is no issue with the market.
The ancestral land had remained unused after farming was abandoned. “In the 1990s, there was a trend of leaving the village, and we followed that trend,” he said. “We struggled in the market town, educated our children—our two sons work in government service, and our daughter is abroad. After all that, we returned to the village after three decades to make use of the neglected land.”
After moving to the market town, Paudel’s old house in the village had collapsed. Upon returning, he built a simple house to live in. He has terraced small pieces of sloped land by constructing stone walls and leveling them for farming. His neighbor, Gopal Acharya, said that Paudel has shown that with hard work and effort, there are opportunities and possibilities in the village as well. Mallaj, though administratively part of Parbat, is socially, economically, and commercially closely connected with Myagdi, as it lies adjacent to Beni Bazaar, the district headquarters of Myagdi.
The large Mallaj Irrigation Project, which started in 1989 and was completed in 2017, has made things easier for the farmers here. Before that, the lack of irrigation had posed difficulties for cultivating crops.
