Urban Legend: Before IT City in Bengaluru, it was fruit basket, thanks to one man!

Before Bengaluru became India’s IT City and turned into a ‘hot destination’, both figuratively and literally, as we are discovering this summer, it was India’s ‘Garden City’, ‘Horticulture Capital’ and a veritable ‘fruit basket’.

The names of John Cameron, G.H. Krumbiegel, H.C. Javaraya and Dr. M.H. Marigowda are famously associated with Indian horticulture, with Lal Bagh in particular their favourite ‘research station’.

While Cameron, Krumbiegel and Javaraya belonged to the colonial period and became famous developing the Government Gardens, Dr. Marigowda extended horticulture across the state and to the common man.

Consider this: there are 357 horticulture farms across the state, all of them established by Marigowda; and if you buy vegetables and fruits from one of the 276 HOPCOMS outlets, you have again this man to thank for them.

It may perhaps be a good time to recall this ‘urban legend’ at a time when a severe drought across the state is forcing farmers to destroy plantations, such as banana, while the government seems incapable of helping.

For it is the story of one man’s success at converting dry lands across the state into horticulture farms, help farmers earn incomes and even supply them nutrition in the form of fruits and vegetables.

Born in T-Narsipura exactly a hundred years ago in 1916, Marigowda joined the Government Gardens department in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree from Central College, Bengaluru, and a Master’s from Lucknow University. He trained for a year in advanced horticulture at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, and went on to obtain a PhD from Harvard University.

But it was not the degrees, nor the foreign lands that held attraction for him. In a diary he maintained during his London and Harvard days, he wrote, “...take a degree and go like all others with decoration and do nothing, or… serve the people without decoration. God help me.”

He returned to Mysore to rejoin Government Gardens, eventually rising to Superintendent. When it was renamed Department of Horticulture in 1963, he became its first director.

Again, he was more than a regular bureaucrat. “In 1974, I lost my job as a dairy farm daily wager after I suffered a leg injury. My family was in crisis. One day, Marigowda saw me in my village in Mandya and asked me if I would like to work for a government-run horticulture farm. I immediately said, yes, I would.

He handed me a small piece of paper, and that was the recruitment process”, Krishnappa Gowda, a gardener at Lal Bagh, recalls. “I have spent my entire life here since then. Marigowda was a great man. He changed our lives, he guided us and gave us a work ethic and a level of precision.”

Marigowda was an institution-builder. Not only did he convert unused government lands to horticulture farms, he also started horticulture training centres, the grape growers’ association, the nurserymen’s coop society, a seed testing laboratory and coconut nurseries, and the HOPCOMS.

Of all his initiatives, in a state where many districts such as Kolar, Tumkur, Chitradurga receive scant rainfall, Marigowda’s dry land horticulture was a godsend. Where others would not tread, he would find ways to make the land fit for horticulture, bringing in soil and water conservation systems for all kinds of landscapes.

If it was a valley, check dams were created. Where there were slopes, he would make trenches and plant for soil conservation. He even introduced a kind of ‘drip irrigation’ – a pot with a hole plugged by cotton was buried next to a sapling so that water drips through the cotton to the soil, and the sapling would grow on a single pot of water!

Once soil and water were conserved, dry land crops like jackfruit, jamun, amla, ber fruit, tamarind and the like were grown, turning the land into a source of revenue, and the farms into ‘progeny orchards’, yielding rich gene pools.

Lal Bagh, which he extended from 188 acres to 240 acres, became the nucleus of his seed experiments, bringing in a variety of seeds and saplings from outside the state.

“He brought robusta banana from Maharashtra and Delhi, coconut varieties from Kerala, varieties of orange, Chiku from Kolkata, and varieties of vegetables from abroad.

He would test, acclimatize and propagate them in Lal Bagh and then distribute them to the villages”, recalls Dr. Jagadeesh, joint director for parks and gardens at the Lal Bagh Botanical Garden. “He toured the state and wherever he found unused government land, he took up mass planting, getting Lal Bagh staff to fence and landscape the parcel”.

But Marigowda did not stop there. He would hire a bullock cart and take the fruits and vegetables from the farms to the surrounding villages and sell them at low prices. The final piece of his mission, it seemed, was to supply nutrition to the poor and needy.

The Karnataka government gave Marigowda the title of ‘Thotagarika Ratna’ in 1993. His birthday – August 8 -- is ‘Horticulture Day’. Among his peers worldwide, Marigowda is the ‘Father of Indian Horticulture’.
The department has not raised a single new horticulture farm since Marigowda’s time. Testimony to one man’s vision and achievements? Or, the failure of his successors?