Kalanabagram

Kalanabagram is reached by rickshaw or a brisk walk among rice fields and irrigation channels. Our former partner there, Shiksha Niketan, was set up just before Independence by a group of freedom fighters as a model community dedicated to providing basic education to rural people. They very generously allowed us to rent premises on their sprawling, leafy campus and in 1984 FERRY established there its first Model Poultry.


The idea behind this step was to demonstrate in Bardhaman to people’s satisfaction that poultry-keeping was commercially rewarding, as there was a prevailing notion that this was a loss-making line of work. This was mainly due to unscientific running of poultries and unhelpful advice from various governmental authorities promoting poultry-keeping.

FERRY determined that to sustain a family a poultry must have at least 800 layer birds and a capital outlay at least double what the government recommended. We then set up a model poultry that would fit the bill—it was a success from the start and local interest was enormous. FERRY then began imparting training in six-week courses to interested people. In a couple of years there were almost a hundred poultries of varying sizes producing both meat and eggs in the area. Once the business became popular in the area FERRY with the sponsorship of ITC Ltd also set up a Veterinary Dispensary and Pathological Lab for the use of the local farmers.
In 1988 FERRY held an Entrepreneurship Development Programme at Kalanabagram with the aid of the Bengali daily Aajkaal. A counselling centre was set up at Shiksha Niketan to advise entrepreneurs in the area. The following year, finding that operations were promising to get bigger, FERRY leased a large shed from Shiksha Niketan and installed a Printing Press there to train press machine-men and hand compositors in Bengali composing. The Indo-German Society (Deutsch-Indische Gesellschaft eV) supported this project financially.

In the next two years FERRY ran courses in Spray Painting, in Carpentry and in Autorickshaw Driving. We also acquired plant to train people in Box, Packet and Envelope Making, but this training never took off in a big way. One idea which we tried early on was the Commercial Use of Water Hyacinths. In 1995 we conducted a year-long Carpentry Training Course at Kalanabagram. This marked the end of a phase, for FERRY felt the need to retrench, and gave up the lease on the shed at Shiksha Niketan, suspending activity at the site. The printing press was shifted to Borsul. We returned to Kalanabagram in 1998, but the venture was not a success and we decided to make our withdrawal permanent.