Dr. Kavitha's phone rang for the third time before eight in the morning. A farmer she had met once, two hundred kilometres of her territory away, described yellowing in his cotton and asked if she could come today. She could not. She had a visit booked at the other end of the district and a promise to another farmer she could not break.
She had forty farms to look after and a car with a cracked windscreen. The questions were reasonable, the farmers were worried, and the hours simply did not exist.
That evening she sat in her car outside a field and counted the farms she had visited that week and the ones she had only spoken to. She realised that the farms she knew best were not the ones with the biggest problems. They were the ones she happened to live near.
She wrote a question on the back of an envelope: what do I need to know before I can help someone well, and how much of it can I learn without driving there?
She began asking every farmer the same few things whenever they called: which crop, which stage, which field, when it started, how much of the field, and could they send two photos, one close and one from a distance. Within a month, she could tell in five minutes which problems could wait a day and which could not.
She started keeping a short note on each farm: soil type, usual crops, past problems, what advice she had given and what had happened. Before any visit, she read it. At the farm, she spent less time asking and more time looking.
Some farmers took to it quickly. They sent clear photos, kept their own notes and told her what they had tried before she asked. Those farms improved fastest, and not because she visited them more. They had learned to describe their fields, which meant she could help them from anywhere.
She never stopped driving. A cracked windscreen was part of the job. But she stopped feeling like a person who was failing forty farmers, and started feeling like someone who could give each of them her full attention when she had it.