This Women’s Day, Help a Woman Farmer in Maharashtra Get a Solar Dehydrator & Start Her Business

Last year was particularly tough for Varsha Dhanavade, a farmer from Maharashtra’s Mhaswad. Despite a bountiful harvest of pomegranates — Varsha’s three-acre orchard has nearly 1,000 pomegranate trees — she was unable to sell most of them. 

As the middlemen reasoned with her, no customer in a high-end market would be interested in buying pomegranates that had blemishes, even if their sweetness were intact. “Customers want pomegranates that are shiny and good. And so, we lose a lot of money,” Varsha explains. 

Advertisment

Add The Better India As A Trusted Source

The ‘perfect’ pomegranates give stiff competition to others that aren’t as ‘good-looking’.  

In the hope that the fruits will eventually find buyers, farmers like Varsha stock them. But this isn’t a viable option either, as, eventually, the fruits begin to rot. “It is really sad,” Varsha shares. “We spend so much money on irrigation, fertilisers, and growing the crop. When it rots, it is like watching all our money go to waste.” 

This then has a ripple effect on the farmers’ lives. It translates into loss of opportunities and hinders their chances to dream big. 

This Women’s Day, we want this to change. The Better India, in collaboration with Mann Deshi Foundation, wants to ensure women in Maharashtra’s most vulnerable villages get access to solar dehydrators, which will help them process the harvested fruits to avoid post-harvest crop spoilage.  

Donate Now

These women farmers belong to Satara, Sangli, and Solapur districts of Maharashtra, and are supported by the Mann Deshi Agriculture Centre that helps them with adopting a scientific and sustainable orchard management approach. 

Since 1996, the foundation has been empowering women with knowledge, capital, market linkages, and social support, helping them to gain control over their finances. 

The solar dehydrator is another step in this endeavour. 

How will your donation help the women?

As per a report, Indian farmers incur Rs 92,651 crore per year in post-harvest losses. 

We turn our gaze towards Maharashtra’s Satara, Sangli, and Solapur districts, where the real faces of climate resilience are visible in the form of the women farmers who grapple with produce losses due to heat waves, unseasonal rains, and insect attacks. 

In Maharashtra, post-harvest losses in fruits are more than just statistics; they represent months of a farmer’s labour wasted. Growers of mangoes, grapes, and pomegranates often watch a portion of their harvest spoil due to poor storage, delayed transport, and limited market access. 

For small farmers, this can mean lost income and mounting debt. Investing in fruit processing, turning fresh produce into pulp, juice, or dried products, not only reduces waste but also extends shelf life, stabilises prices, and ensures farmers earn more from what they grow.

While sun-drying is a technique rampant in Maharashtra, Nidhi Pant, co-founder of S4S Technologies, an agritech startup that provides solar-powered dehydrators to women farmers to help them increase the shelf-life of agricultural produce, shares in an interview with Mongabay-India, “Direct sun drying results in the heat spreading unevenly, and it takes about six to seven days to thoroughly dry the produce. In this process, it is susceptible to fungus growth and other environmental challenges.” 

This is where a solar dehydrator can help. 

“Solar dehydrators can do this [the drying of the produce] in six to eight hours. The colour, texture, and aroma can be matched with the industry requirements, and it is more hygienic, and the nutrition is retained,” Nidhi explains. 

While protecting the produce from secondary contamination by rain, dust, insects, rodents, or birds, the fruits are dried using hot air. Not only is this one way to help the produce weather the effects of changing climate patterns, but it also offers the slightly blemished produce a lifeline. 

Through the duration of the campaign, the Mann Deshi Foundation will select the beneficiary farmers based on need, farming activity, and readiness to adopt technology. They will take care of the procurement, installation, setup, on-ground coordination, demonstrations, and initial technical support for each unit. 

Practical orientations will be conducted for women farmers on safe usage, basic maintenance, and maximising benefits for farming and enterprise use. 

Helping women farmers dream

The United Nations declared 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer. While playing the role of stalwarts in India’s agrarian economy across agrifood systems, producing, processing, and trading food that sustains families, communities, and economies, they often go unnoticed.

But this Women’s Day, we want to ensure them support and, through the solar dehydrators, ensure they can dream big. Elaborating on their work with the women farmers in Maharashtra, the team at Mann Deshi shares that, through the DRE (decentralised renewable energy) livelihood technologies, the goal is to enable women farmers to strengthen and grow their farming businesses through access to clean, cost-saving green technologies that improve irrigation, reduce dependence on conventional fuels, and enhance post-harvest processing and value addition. 

Donate Now

As Anagha Kamath, Director of Innovation, Mann Deshi Foundation, shares, “Women play a critical role in farming operations, ranging from sowing, weeding, harvesting, livestock care, and post-harvest processing, yet they often have limited access to productive assets, technology, and market opportunities.” 

She adds, “Farmers in the region face persistent challenges such as water scarcity, rising input costs, dependence on conventional energy sources, and post-harvest losses due to inadequate storage and processing facilities. These constraints disproportionately impact women farmers, who manage both farm responsibilities and household care work, leaving limited time and resources to expand their farming enterprises.” 

In her view, “Green technology solutions like the solar dehydrators will help women farmers reduce post-harvest losses and enable them to process and preserve produce of fruits and vegetables. This will support value addition, improve shelf life, and open new income opportunities through local sales and markets.” It will also help counter the monopoly that ‘perfect-looking’ produce enjoys in the big markets. 

Archana Babar from Satara, who cultivates mangoes in her orchard, recalls the Rs 4 lakh loss she faced a few years ago when unseasonal rains destroyed her crop. Things are unpredictable, she reasons. 

She shares, “We used to be hopeful about harvest and reaping many mangoes. But, we realised that no matter how many mangoes we can grow, we cannot sell all.” 

The story doesn’t end here. 

Archana explains, “My daughter was studying in class 8 and would always tell me that she wanted to go to Japan for further studies. She had read that in Japan, there was an institute that taught how to engineer machines that could carry food for astronauts in space. But with all these farming losses, we were never able to promise her that we could send her out of the village to study; out of India was a distant dream.” 

‘Maybe once you receive the solar dehydrator, things will improve,’ I tell Archana. 

“My daughter passed away a few years ago,” she shares. “I still regret that I could never even promise her that I would try to make her dream come true.” 

Today, when anyone commends Archana about the way she handles her mango orchard, she smiles sadly: “If a farmer’s daughter could dare to dream beyond the village, and think of space, I should also have at least some of the strength she had.” 

By being resilient, Archana says she’s honoring the spirit of her daughter.

This Women’s Day, we want to ensure that women farmers like Archana do not have to put their or their children’s dreams on the back burner any longer. By donating to this cause and helping them get access to a solar dehydrator, you can ensure them financial security, work, and a chance to widen their horizons of hope. 

Donate Now

All pictures courtesy Mann Deshi Foundation

Sources 

'From Plentiful Harvests to Empty Pockets: The Devastating Effects of Post-Harvest Losses': Published in Gram Heet.

'Technologies to decrease food loss and increase farmer incomes': by Priyanka Shankar, Published on 26 April 2024.