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An image of Lord Ganesha in his farmland at Donje Phata, near Sinhagad fort. While working towards the conservation of rice varieties available in the countryside, he created this eye-catching paddy art.
Talking about the process, the engineer and amateur botanist says, “The first step in paddy art is to sketch the drawing. And, then it has to be fitted in a format, which is followed by geometrical revisions and divisions. By divisions, I mean that the image has to be divided into squares. For example, if the size of the image is 70x120ft, then we divide it into four sizes of 10x10ft each, which means 84 squares. The rice crop has to be planted in these squares. All this is initially done on paper and then on computer.”
However, the designing part isn’t difficult, the challenge, says Ingalhalikar, is to get into knee-deep slush to plant the crop. He managed to do it, along with his farm labourers.