As one approaches this village around 5 km off the main road from Bhuj town to the “White Rann” – the vast picturesque salt desert is hardly 15 km away at the turn – there’s nothing except sand and patches of Prosopis juliflora, a thorny shrub locally known as “ganda bawal”.
Appearances can be deceptive, though. Erandavali, the village in Bhuj Taluka of Gujarat’s Kutch district, is home to just 30 families making up 250-odd people.
Yet, these 30 households — all from the Muslim Maldhari pastoralist community — together supplied 529,341 litres of milk to the Kutch District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union during the year ended March 31, 2017. For this entire milk, they received a total payment of Rs 2.18 crore or Rs 7.26 lakh per family — in an arid and saline region not receiving even 350 mm of average annual rainfall!
Read more of this interesting report by Harish Damodaran published in The Indian Express... (The photograph is also by Harish for IE)
