There's A Berry Interesting Story Behind India's Strawberry Success

We might look proudly today at our ingenuity in growing the fruit in arid areas but behind this ‘miracle’ is a global journey across the Americas, Europe to desi shores

- Vikram Doctor

Strawberries seem to be popping up everywhere. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Mann Ki Baat he lauded the efforts of Jhansi-based Gurleen Kaur in growing strawberries in the arid area of Bundelkhand. She grew them on her terrace, then took them into fields and now Jhansi has a strawberry festival.

The PM could also have cited his home state where, in December last year, TOI reported on strawberries being grown in the near-desert of Kutch. Haresh Thacker got 30,000 plants from the strawberry fields of Lonavla in Maharashtra, used Israeli-inspired drip irrigation and has now harvested his first crop. And in the same month, TOI reported on another young farmer, Shyam Gaonkar who has grown strawberries in the tropical conditions of Goa’s Sattari taluka, where they flourish alongside chillies.

But perhaps the most unlikely place to grow strawberries in India was reported by TOI in 1884 when it noted “the success of the experiment at the Tanna Jail gardens under the able superintendence of Mr. SS Smith”. Tanna is now Thane and the strawberry plants presumably benefited from the free labour of prison inmates, but it proved they could be grown in the humid climate of the Konkan coast as well as the hills of the Western ghats.