Away from the city bustle, these professionals choose to live close to nature

It is an incongruous sight. A mix of young and middle-aged, upper-middle-class city dwellers, carrying bamboo barks, digging up land and helping build a shed on a farm 80 km from Bengaluru. A fickle breeze gives the “workers” in caps, sunglasses and other urban accoutrements occasional respite from a relentless sun.

Stretching ahead as far as eye can see, this is the 75 acre Tamarind Valley Collective, bordered by forests and hills. But it’s not the size that makes it distinct. With plans for houses for all its 47 co-owners, sufficient food crops, solar plants, a community kitchen for residents and its own water supply, it is an ambitious experiment looking to offer a sustainable, self-sufficient way of living, and a hedge against the vagaries of the rest of the world.

Chopping a log of wood is Akash Gehani, cofounder of payments startup Instamojo, and one of the coowners of the Tamarind Valley Collective. “I have always loved nature and had become disappointed with the way we were treating the environment,” says the 34-year-old, who intends to spend his weekends at the farm, to begin with.

In a shed thatched with coconut fronds, another co-owner, Harishri Babuji, is helping stitch jute sacks. On any other weekday, she could be found at her desk in a multinational technology services firm in Whitefield in Bengaluru, where she spends up to 12 hours a day, before she reaches home after battling traffic for 45 minutes. Babuji says her decision to become part of the collective was the culmination of a journey that began five years ago, when she started questioning how people could reduce their “horrific impact” on the planet. What began with de-cluttering her home soon led to mulling over how to live more sustainably.

Gehani and Babu are hardly alone in having these thoughts. Study after study indicates that India’s metropolises are nearing breaking point under the strain of frenetic development and civic administration and systems that haven’t kept pace. If Delhi’s citizens are gasping for clean air, Bengaluru is faced with the prospect of its water running out in a few years, nightmarish traffic congestion and mismanagement of waste. Coupled with this is the growing desire among some professionals who have spent years in the rat race to slow down and find an alternative way of living closer to nature. Tamarind Valley Collective holds out the alluring promise of a sustainable solution, at a price.

Located in Thagatti in Tamil Nadu bordering Karnataka, the year-old farm is surrounded by forests and hills. On a recent public holiday, some of its owners and a few volunteers have driven down to get their hands dirty. “We call it ‘agri cult fit,’” grins Sameer Shisodia, cofounder of Tamarind Valley and its parent company, Beforest, punning on the popular fitness chain Cult.

An alumnus of BITS who worked at Wipro and Oracle and sold his mobile search startup before launching leisure hospitality chain Linger, Shisodia had been contemplating a sustainable farming venture for years. But he had known quite a few people who had tried their hand at farming and abandoned it, for various reasons. He then hit upon the idea of setting up a farm that would be run as a collective with a few permanent staff to manage it and dailywage farm hands to do the heavy lifting.

“A collective makes things easier in many ways: it automatically gives you more scale and it gamifies the entire process. By having professional staff to manage it, the farm need not be dependent on the owners turning up,” says Shisodia. The owners have paid Rs 37 lakh each to be part of Tamarind Valley, while another 22 people have signed up to be part of a second farming collective outside Hyderabad. Parent company Beforest is looking to start more such forest farms eventually.

The investment gives each owner 1.5 acres and an eco-friendly, one-bedroom house, with the farmland being pooled and cultivated collectively.

The idea is to let natural ecosystems function with minimum interference. The farm, which aims to be self-sufficient in another 5 years or so, will also have a set of rooms that would be let out, to supplement revenue.

Owners share similar values of sustainability and do not see it as a real estate investment, says Shisodia. They would also need to be people who can afford to invest close to Rs 40 lakh, wait 2-3 years for the soil on the farm to recover and also not rely on the farm as a source of income. “Around 330 people had approached us, from which we took 47 on board. But every single one of the people I spoke to were certain they do not want to continue living in the city — it was a very strong sentiment,” says Shisodia, who sees the initiative as a kind of Noah’s Ark whose residents would be protected from the storms already buffeting our cities.

This sentiment propelling a group of people to come together and figure out local solutions to universal problems like pollution is similar to the Transition Towns movement in the West. Beginning in the mid-2000s in England, it involved people in towns coming together to achieve self-sufficiency in food, energy and other resources in a world threatened by climate change and skyrocketing fuel prices.

While there might not be a definite Transition Town movement in India, it is not just in Bengaluru that these options are being considered. In Mumbai, Priyanka Amar Shah has been helping residents start their own urban gardens and grow their food for the last years through her firm, iKheti. “We get a of calls from people who have bought land and want to start farming but don’t know how to go about it,” says Shah, who pegs people’s increasing urge to grow their food to heightened awareness about pesticide use and in some cases, the desire to move wide open spaces. Shah herself is looking buy farmland outside Mumbai and move there. “We had been thinking about it and our baby’s birth has only strengthened our resolve. You don’t want your child growing up in a polluted city,” says Shah.

Considering the prohibitive land prices in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai, there are also enterprises that enable you to rent a farm and help you maintain it, or grow your food on your balcony. Edible Routes, based in the National Capital Region, is one such venture. “From a handful of enquiries a month when we started, interest has grown about 20-fold,” says Kapil Mandawewala, who gave up his consulting job in Deloitte in San Francisco to return to India and start organic farming. He attributes the growing interest to “all the negatives of city life, from pollution to traffic.”

City Fatigue
Back at Tamarind Valley, prospective residents cite these and other reasons for their plan to eventually move away from city life. For Amit Jain, an executive with HP, it was the desire to live off the land. “When you come here to the farm and work and get your hands dirty, your body might be tired but the mind becomes fresh,” says Jain, who is in his 50s.

Others cite the attraction of living as a community, and the prospect of being selfsufficient. “The farm will offer food and water security and will be a strong hedge for life. It also solves all the problems of having to run a farm by yourself,” says Rajiv Prakash, former head of Future Group’s digital commerce business. While some of the buyers, like Jain, plan to move to the farm permanently in two or three years, others like Babuji plan to divide their time between the city and the farm. “In a month, I’ll be spending more time at the farm than in the city,” says Babuji, who will continue working remotely and is eagerly anticipating her new life.

An experiment like this is not without its challenges, nor the owners without apprehensions. “You will need to figure out what you will do with your time once you slow down, and also be aware of what you are letting go of,” says Prakash. “We will see how it goes for a year at least,” says Renuka Mahato, a homemaker likely to be among the first to move to the farm with her husband and daughter once the houses are ready. Her husband, Rajesh Thayagarajan, an executive with Wipro, jokes that he did not know about this one-year deadline. Disagreements among the owners are settled through discussions, like at a resident welfare association.

Integrating with the local community around would also be a challenge, acknowledges Shisodia. “Just by arriving in our cars in the village, we are different.”

Then there is the question of what would happen if someone changes their mind and wants out. “We are working on the bylaws and will have clauses to ensure first right of refusal for a sale is to current residents, and so on,” says Shisodia. This was why it was important to ensure that those buying into the project shared their vision about sustainable living, he says.

“If things don’t work out, if I don’t continue in Bengaluru or if I become disinterested, there is no backup plan as such,” says Instamojo’s Gehani, among the few owners who do not own another flat in the city. “It’s an expensive shot. But I’m used to taking risks,” he adds.