BUDIAMA : Fulfils Her Mission

I don´t know all this centimeter stuff, you tell me how much it comes to in fingers and elbows.. before you go, tell me how to get rid of those awful caterpillars in my tomato patch…. JTA babu, please walk back carefully, the path is slippery! Han Sharanam!"

Budi Ama is at it again, nagging and bullying the every tolerant JTA over Radio Nepal´s farm broadcast programme, Budi Ama ra JTA ("The old woman and the agricultural extension worker"), that is aired Friday evenings. Having run without a break for twenty years over Nepal´s only radio station, Budi Ama is probably the foremost media personality in the kingdom today. The targetted farmers and city slicks alike take to her whining, cajoling, nosey, cantankerous and altogether lovable image of the grandma next door.

Lovable grandma
The voice that has been backing Budi Ama through her fits of asthmatic coughing and between sighs of arthritic pain is that of Laxmi Bhusal, Who is incredibly only in her early thirties. Quiet and reticent, it is veiy difficult to connect Bhusal with her radio persona. And she began "doing" Budi Ama when she was eleven!

"She has come along with her sister who was applying for a job," recalls Kiran Mani Dixit, Chief of HMG´s Agricultural Information Division, who was then looking for a person to play the village grandma. "It was her alertness that struck me when I first saw her. A few basic tips on how to speak and act like an old lady was all the little girl needed. Soon, she was coughing and wheezing like she had been born with asthma!" Dixit recalls.

Bhusal showed an equal knack for scriptwriting, even though her formal education was quite limited. "In the beginning, I got help to fill in the technical details, but before long I was writing my own programmes," she says. "I constantly try to update my agricultural knowledge by reading books and journals. At every instance I have to ask myself what a villager´s response to a new fertiliser, seed or breed of animal or fowl would be".

Other than the news broadcasts, Bhusal rs programme has consistently held the record as Radio Nepal´s most listened to broadcast. A recent Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) survey showed that 71 per cent of farmers questioned preferred Budi Ama´s format to any other. "Our target audience are small income farmers, and we have managed to retain their interest for a score of years," says Dixit, "We struck the right social and psychological and social chord".

A factor in the programme´s popularity is use of simple Nepali, which contrasts sharply with the complicated and over-sanskritised presentation of other broadcasts and also the print media. "It takes a lot of hard work to give body to a relatively "dry" subject", says Bhusal. "I speak into the mike colloquially, avoiding technical terms as far as practicable. For example, when we have to resort to new standardised metric measurements, I coax the JTA to explain them in layman´s terms. A gram of fertiliser is a matchboxful. Pesticides are explained in terms of texture, colour and odour".

Spiced with gossipy banter and the never-ending household problems of Budi Ama, the programme has a committed urban audience as well. Chandra Kumari, 71, a Kathmandu great-grandmother, tunes in every Friday "for useful gardening hints". ShovaSharma, a widow who lives in a simple rented quarter in the capital, says, "I do not have a single square foot of land to call my own, yet I like to listen to the old woman. It is entertaining and, who knows, the knowledge might prove useful one day." The fan mail that pours into Dixit´s office from farmers across Nepal makes it clear that Budi Ama mouths their problems to the JTA.

Poultry farm
When faced with the problem of how to introduce the agricultural., extension workers to the rural populace 2P;Vears ago, Dixit and his colleagues hit upon the idea of an inquisitive grandmother as the natural person to accost the newly arrived JTA. Today, Budi Ama´s small vegetable patch has expanded to flowing fields. The JTA has persuaded her to open a piggery and a poultry farm and she takes interest in fruit farming as well. She is increasingly knowledgable about agricultural matters and the JTA doesn´t need to remind her of quarterly irrigation and how exactly to fertilise crops.

Now that farmers have been acquainted with the basic farming techniques, says Bhusal, it is just a matter of telling them about new advances in agricultural implementation. "The cycle of crops is the same from year to year, and I have to take care lest the programme become repetitive and monotonous," she says. Budi Ama´s originator, Kiran Mani Dixit, ´will be retiring soon. The old woman, too, has served her initial purpose of making the JTA household term in village Nepal, It would be narrow-minded to think that Bhusal, with her talents, should not pursue other challenges, perhaps in other media. A day might" come when the fire and the excitement dies, in Budi Ama´s eyes, and. she succumbs to asthmatic complications. That will be a sad day for all Nepalis.