From hills to plains, apple breaks new ground

Shamsher Chandel

Chandigarh, March 6

The quintessential apple has finally ventured out of the hills of Himachal Pradesh to the warmer plains, courtesy Hariman Sharma, a Bilaspur-based progressive farmer.

Hariman, a farm labourer back in the 1990s was complacent growing mangoes on his small farm in Bilaspur, a place that neither has altitude nor the winter chill required for apples. After a chance meeting with an orchardist from the neighbouring Shimla district in 1999, who gave him a few apple saplings, Hariman planted them in Bilaspur. “I had little hope since Bilaspur has a subtropical climate (hot and humid) and temperature goes up to 45 degrees Celsius. But, when I observed the sprouting of small apple seedlings, I nurtured a few more. In another two years, the tree started bearing fruits, but they were small in size. To improve the quality of apples, I grafted an apple tree on to a plum tree. It paid off in 2005 after a toil of six years,” says Hariman.

After several successful trials over the next couple of years, Hariman applied for a patent of this apple variety in 2014. To examine if the new variety could grow in different climatic conditions, the National Innovation Foundation-India (NIFI) transplanted 10,000 saplings at the farms of about 1,200 farmers in 29 states. Hariman says, “Fruition was successful in MP, Meghalaya, Manipur, Maharashtra, UP, Punjab, Gujarat, Karnataka, Haryana, Rajasthan, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Delhi, and Telangana.” In 2022, Hariman was granted the patent for HRMN-99 (HRMN is an acronym of his name) by the Protection of Plant Variety and Farmers Right Authority, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India, and by the National Innovation Foundation.

Hariman says, “Now, I sell about 50 quintals of produce in local market of Bilaspur in June at a very good price since the traditional varieties of apple aren’t ripe enough to be plucked till the last week of July. The bigger trees in my orchard bear 45-kg apples while the smaller ones give nearly 10 kg.”

Asked if others have also cultivated HRMN-99, he proudly says, “It is being cultivated by farmers in Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan.”

Prof BN Prasad, who lives in a suburb near Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, says, “We have been in touch with Hariman Sharma for the past two years. I planted about 150 apple saplings of the HRMN-99 variety. Of these, 110 started flowering and bearing the fruit after one year. And it tastes very sweet. Now I am planning to plant more saplings.”

He adds that the apple variety can grow without snow and stipulated 1,600 hours of chill required for the traditional varieties. “All that we need is 100 hours of low chill, which means a night temperature of less than 7 degrees Celsius,” says Prasad.

Similarly, Atul Mishra from Hardoi in UP says, “We planted about 600 saplings out of which 400 were damaged due to a fungal infection. The remaining 200 saplings gave us a yield of 3 quintals which we kept for our consumption and distributed among friends and relatives.”

After the success of HRMN-99 in India, the variety was exported to Germany, South Africa, Bangladesh, Nepal and Mauritius. “Recently. I was invited to Oman and we planted the saplings on 50 acre in the coastal city of Salalah, 800 km from Muscat. I am expecting an invite from the Malaysian government to grow the variety in one of their cities,” says Hariman.

For his contribution to the field of horticulture, Hariman has received the National Innovative Farmer Award from the Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister. He was also honoured with the Grassroots Innovation and Outstanding Traditional Knowledge Award in 2017 by the then President Pranab Mukherjee.

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