COVID-19: Mushrooms budding instead of students in Indian school

Patna: A prominent school in Bihar is using its vacant classrooms for mushroom farming to generate revenues after it ran into huge financial losses due to extended closures as a result of COVID-19. Mani Dweep Academy is currently earning around Rs200,000 per month from mushroom farming and the school administration has decided to continue with the profitable business even after the school is reopened for teaching.

The residential English medium school located in Jamui district, some 150 km east of Patna, turned to mushroom farming when all its sources of income dried up as a result of corona-induced lockdown. Prior to lockdown, the school had three sources of income—monthly school fees, rooms rented out to students for their stay and the amount collected in lieu of providing food to the children.

The school has a total of 30 classrooms and a total of 1,400 students are enrolled in this school imparting teaching from nursery to grade 10. However, it has engaged only the school’s non-teaching staff in the business whereas the teachers’ job is to take online classes.

“We ran into huge financial losses as the school remained shut for long and collection of fees turned very little. We were facing virtual survival problems and it was very hard for us to make payments to our teachers and other staff. So, we anxiously looked for various options to generate money but ultimately settled for mushroom farming since it required only limited movements which suited us due to Corona-induced lockdown,” school director Abhishek Kumar told Gulf News.

He said he gathered all the related information from the internet, got online training from local agriculture scientists and arranged seeds to start mushroom farming in the vacant classrooms. He started the business in June and now he is earning handsome money from its sale. According to him, mushroom gets ready for use roughly within a month and hence it is a quick money-making business.

“We never imagined mushroom farming will boost our economic condition this way. We earned handsome money from its sale barely after a month of its farming,” Abhishek said. According to him, last month they earned something around Rs200,000 by selling some 100 kg of mushroom at the rate of Rs200 per kg in the open market. “Around 80 kg of mushrooms are still ready in our classrooms,” he said.

He said the mushrooms being produced in his school have huge demand in the market but they are unable to meet the market demand. “Now we have decided to continue with the business even after the school is opened for study. But instead of classrooms we will shift to another place for this farming. This is a very profitable business involving less work and high returns,” he said.

The school has now set the target of producing 1,000 kg mushroom per month from the next month. The school has already got 700 bags ready for this purpose and it will be producing three separate varieties of mushrooms. Currently, it is producing oyster mushrooms while it plans to produce button mushrooms too in days to come.

“Mushroom farming is an easy way to earn money but what is important is the idea launched by the school will inspire the youths to adopt this business to fight severe unemployment crisis,” chief agricultural scientist, Jamui, Dr Sudhir Kumar Singh said.