Padma Shri Kale Tegeyo Kanteppa (ಪದ್ಮ ಶ್ರೀ ಕಳೆ ತೆಗೆಯುವ ಕಂಟೆಪ್ಪ)
- Madhukar Dama
- 6 hours ago
- 14 min read
---
1. Prologue: The Man with the Khurpi
It is still dark when he rises.
The sky over Hanumanthvadi is a quiet sheet of grey, and the birds are still dreaming.
He folds his thin cotton bedsheet, pours ambali into an earthen cup, and walks barefoot to the low shelf where his khurpi rests.
Iron. Worn. Still sharp.
Kanteppa ties a cloth satchel around his waist and steps out without a word.
He is one hundred years old.
He walks slowly but steadily—like someone whose legs no longer ask permission from the mind.
Every morning, for the last ninety years, he has done the same thing:
He goes to remove weeds.
Not from his own land. He has none.
Not from government orders. He never received any.
Not for money. He never asked.
Just weeds. Wherever he saw them.
Today, like most days, he stops outside the compound of the local government school.
The outer wall is cracked. Half-painted. A cow has tied itself to the fencepost.
Children will arrive in two hours.
Kanteppa kneels on the edge of the red mud beside the gate. He bends down.
The weeds are many. Long, stubborn, sharp.
He does not flinch. His fingers are slow, precise.
He knows the roots.
He knows where they snap.
He knows which weeds rot easily, and which become mulch.
He knows which soil will loosen with the first tug and which one will resist.
He works like this every morning—from dawn to midday—without speaking, without asking.
This is his ritual. His remembrance. His service.
People call him all sorts of things.
Some call him mad.
Some call him holy.
Some just stare and walk past.
But most now call him something else: “Kale Tegeyo.”
It is not a name.
It is a title.
A recognition.
A phrase in Kannada meaning: “The one who removes weeds.”
But his real name is Kanteppa.
Born before independence.
Widowed early.
Raised a son on his back while weeding schoolyards.
Insulted by officers. Ignored by society.
Honored now—at last—with the Padma Shri, though it made no difference to his daily rhythm.
His life, like the weeds he removes, is made of repetition.
His legacy, like the plants he nurtures, is made of silence and patience.
Today, if you travel through Bidar and see tidy kitchen gardens blooming outside anganwadis, or rows of onions behind bus stops, or schoolchildren pulling weeds without being told—it is because of him.
Because Kanteppa bent down, for a hundred years, and pulled out the neglect that nobody else wanted to touch.
And because he never stopped.
—
2. Hanumanthvadi: Soil, Caste, and Silence
Kanteppa was born in 1925, in a mud-walled hut at the edge of Hanumanthvadi, a village in Bidar district that most maps forgot until decades later.
His father was a bonded farmhand, working without wage, bound by an ancestral debt that never seemed to end.
His mother, thin and sharp-eyed, collected grass for upper-caste cows. She walked 5 kilometres a day just to gather bundles others could burn in minutes.
They owned nothing. Not a patch of land. Not a lockable door. Not even a proper surname.
Kanteppa never went to school. There was one school, yes, but no shoes, no uniform, and certainly no tolerance for someone from his side of the village.
He didn’t protest. He simply watched.
He watched as weeds grew freely outside the school.
He watched as temple compounds overflowed with thorny grass.
He watched the roadsides, the graveyards, the abandoned village wells—all covered in green neglect.
He saw how weeds grew where people stopped caring.
Where status ended, weeds began.
He noticed how no one touched weeds.
Not teachers. Not priests. Not landowners.
To them, weeds were dirty. Useless. Beneath them.
He began to think:
“If no one wants them, I will take them.”
“If they do not belong to anyone, they will belong to me.”
That thought, small and quiet like a pebble, became his life's river.
---
3. The Birth of the Khurpi
When he was ten, Kanteppa found a twisted iron shard near a blacksmith’s shed.
He shaped it—slowly, silently—into a blade. He fixed it to a broken wooden handle using a strip of old cycle tyre.
It was his first khurpi.
He didn’t show anyone.
He just began using it.
At first, he cleared the overgrowth outside his home. Then near the cattle shed. Then outside the village temple—where he wasn’t even allowed inside.
Nobody asked him to. Nobody thanked him. He didn’t expect either.
Every morning, before his parents woke, he went out and cleared a few feet of weeds.
He returned, dusted off his hands, and helped with chores like nothing happened.
By thirteen, he was known among children as “that boy who cuts grass where no one tells him to.”
By fifteen, he had already weeded the edges of every public space in Hanumanthvadi once.
He began a habit he would never stop:
Wake before sunrise. Weeding until noon. Return home. Eat ragi mudde. Rest. Repeat.
No one noticed that he wasn’t just removing weeds.
He was learning the texture of soil, the weight of roots, the way water moved after weeding, and the rhythm of regrowth.
He was becoming fluent in a language no one else wanted to learn:
the silent language of living soil.
---
4. Love, Loss, and Fatherhood on the Back
At 22, Kanteppa married Neelamma, a quiet girl from the next village.
She liked his silence. He liked her calm presence. There was no dowry, no photos, no feast. Just a small knot, tied with turmeric thread, under a neem tree.
For a few short months, Kanteppa smiled more. He weeded with an extra bounce.
But life is not always kind to those who ask nothing from it.
Neelamma died during childbirth.
There was no doctor in the village.
The midwife came late.
There was too much bleeding.
She held Kanteppa’s hand once. Then never again.
He didn’t speak for a week. Then, quietly, began carrying on.
Their child—a boy—survived.
Kanteppa named him Chenna, after his mother.
There was no cradle. No one to help.
So Kanteppa tied the baby to his back with an old shawl and went back to weeding.
Every morning. Same hours. Same khurpi. Now with a sleeping baby swaying with his every motion.
He became a strange sight:
A barefoot man, hunched over, cutting weeds with one hand while patting a baby on his back with the other.
People laughed.
“Madman widower.”
“Who weeds other people’s land with a baby tied to his back?”
Kanteppa never answered.
He just changed locations.
From school walls to tank bunds.
From hospital grounds to roadside fields.
The baby grew, the weeds came back, and Kanteppa kept weeding.
No photograph exists of that time.
But old villagers say:
“If you walked anywhere at dawn in those years, you would see one man and one baby—always together. Clearing what no one else could see.”
—
5. A Weeder Becomes a Teacher
It was a day like any other.
Kanteppa was clearing weeds behind a half-crumbled anganwadi wall when he paused.
He noticed something small pushing through the loosened soil: a brinjal seedling, fresh and green, its leaves trembling under a thin film of dust.
He knelt closer. The soil had become loose and moist from his weeding two days before.
A piece of discarded vegetable scrap from someone’s lunch—half a brinjal—had taken root.
It grew not in a farm, but in a forgotten corner, surrounded by wild grass and rusting nails.
That evening, Kanteppa sat long on his verandah, holding his khurpi.
He thought:
“Weeds can become mulch. Mulch can become food. Waste can become life.”
From the next morning onward, he began to leave weeds in neat heaps after pulling them.
He showed a few curious children how to press dry weeds down around plants to protect the soil.
He taught them which weeds rot fast and which keep ants away.
He began planting beans, amaranth, tomatoes, and chillies in the newly cleared soil—quietly, without announcement.
Soon, word spread.
A teacher who once mocked him came and asked, “How did you get that many tomatoes without watering?”
He replied:
“The weeds you wanted me to throw away—they kept the water inside.”
Women came next—tired of buying over-sprayed vegetables from the mandi.
He taught them to start small kitchen gardens, using leftover grey water and mulched weeds as cover.
He gave them handfuls of seeds in folded newspaper.
He never asked them to remember his name.
But many began to call their gardens: Kanteppa Thota.
He had never been inside a classroom.
But he had become a teacher.
---
6. Humiliation and Relentless Return
Even as some people learned from him, others continued to mock him.
One day, while clearing weeds along a hospital compound, a watchman pushed him away with a stick.
“You’ll bring snakes!” he shouted.
Another day, while weeding near a school, a headmaster yelled at him in front of children:
“Why are you crawling outside our gate like a beggar? You’re disturbing the children.”
Kanteppa stood up, folded his hands, and left.
The next morning, he came back and weeded the back wall instead.
A municipal officer once fined him for “unauthorised land tampering.”
He paid ₹50 and smiled.
When a local journalist tried to interview him, he refused.
He said, “Write about the plants. Not about me.”
He didn’t crave sympathy or spotlight.
But the humiliation cut deep, especially when it came from those who wore polished shoes but never touched soil.
And yet—he never stopped.
He always found a new wall, a new roadside, a new field that needed attention.
He knew: weeds don’t care about caste, language, or government orders.
They grow where the land is forgotten.
And he would follow them there.
---
7. A Garden Grows from Grief
Once, a retired teacher asked him:
“Why are you doing all this? You could have lived quietly.”
Kanteppa looked down and said, after a long silence:
“There were weeds on my mother’s grave. I didn’t remove them. No one did. She disappeared under them.”
That one line was the only explanation he ever gave for the fire that burned in him for a hundred years.
His mother’s grave had been unmarked, unvisited, and eventually invisible under thorns and grass.
When he was twenty, he had gone there and couldn’t even find it. The field had been ploughed over.
She had vanished.
He wept for days.
Then, something changed.
He began seeing all weeds as reminders.
He began pulling them as remembrance.
Every weed removed was a kind of apology to her.
Every vegetable planted, a form of prayer.
He did not believe in building samadhis or putting up statues.
But he believed in this:
“If I remove the weeds that hide things, maybe other people’s mothers won’t be forgotten like mine.”
—
8. The Son Who Carried Forward
His son, Chenna, didn’t grow up like other children.
He learned to balance quietly on Kanteppa’s back before he learned to walk.
His lullabies were the scraping of a khurpi and the sound of roots breaking free.
While other children were told bedtime stories, Chenna fell asleep hearing:
“That’s amrutha balli. Good for fever.”
“Put dry weeds around it, the water won’t run off.”
He grew up barefoot, half-literate, but clear-eyed.
He studied till Class 10, then dropped out—not because he couldn’t study, but because he wanted to stay close to the soil.
He began helping Kanteppa formally—organising morning sessions with village children, preparing seeds, drying cow dung for compost, and experimenting with small plots behind bus stops.
As he entered his thirties, Chenna founded the “Nele-Belaku Foundation”
(meaning “Shelter and Light”)—a small, rural NGO with no office, no glass doors, and no sponsors.
But it spread like seeds on the wind.
They taught kitchen gardening to school cooks and midwives
Helped SHG women grow okra, spinach, and gourds in clay pots and broken buckets
Trained barbers, auto drivers, bus conductors to use terraces and balconies for food
Encouraged schools to maintain “Kanteppa patches” where weeds were composted, not burnt
Over time, over 25,000 people across Karnataka, Telangana, and Maharashtra learned to grow food using weed mulch, grey water, and native seeds.
Chenna still says:
“Appa never gave me land. But he gave me soil.”
---
9. A Silent Agricultural Movement
Kanteppa never made a speech.
But his actions became a philosophy.
He taught that:
You don’t need money to grow food
Weeds are not enemies, but teachers
Soil thrives when it is seen, touched, and fed—not sprayed or left to die under cement
Slowly, a people’s movement began without fanfare.
3,000+ families in North Karnataka now grow vegetables with hand-pulled weeds as mulch
400+ schools and hospitals maintain small food patches in spaces once abandoned
700+ women’s SHGs use his methods for daily nutrition and extra income
Even panchayat buildings and post offices now host tiny, edible gardens in Kanteppa’s style
There was no WhatsApp group, no YouTube channel, no certificate course.
Just people passing on what they had seen:
A man bending down, every day, quietly making space for food to grow where no one else cared to look.
He never wrote a slogan. But his life became one:
“Weed the land. Feed the people. Expect nothing.”
---
10. Recognition Comes Late but Strong
It took nearly a century for the government to notice.
In 2024, when he turned 99, a young IAS officer from Bengaluru visited Hanumanthvadi.
He had grown up watching his grandmother tend a brinjal patch she called “Kanteppa’s gift.”
He insisted on filing the nomination.
That year, the Government of India awarded Padma Shri to Kanteppa, for “unsung grassroots contribution to ecological literacy and food self-reliance.”
He didn’t want to go.
He didn’t own a kurta.
Chenna insisted. So he wore a plain dhoti, tied his satchel, carried his khurpi, and stood silently at Rashtrapati Bhavan, barefoot.
He refused to speak.
He just touched the medal, nodded, and looked at the floor.
His son spoke instead.
He said only this:
“Appa says removing weeds is his way of removing sorrow. Now we all do it together.”
After that, awards poured in:
Rajyotsava Award (Karnataka)
Desi Krushi Ratna Puraskar
Gram Seva Bhushan
A documentary titled “Khurpi Ki Kranti” was made in twelve languages and screened across rural India
But Kanteppa didn’t watch it.
He was weeding behind the primary health centre the morning it aired.
—
11. Today: 100 and Still Weeding
At 100, Kanteppa lives in the same tiled-roof house in Hanumanthvadi.
It has no fan. Just a window facing a small patch of marigolds and bitter gourd.
He eats ragi mudde in the afternoon. Ambali at dawn. Buttermilk at dusk.
He doesn’t use soap, plastic, or cement. He stores seeds in reused tobacco tins.
Every morning, he still wakes before the sun.
He weeds from 5 to 9 AM, then sits on a rock outside his house.
Visitors come—farmers, students, journalists, award-winners, foreigners.
He listens. Nods. Offers a khurpi, a handful of seeds, a line of advice.
He speaks little.
When asked how his body still works, he laughs softly and says:
“Soil holds the body together. Touch it daily.”
His hands are cracked but strong. His eyes pale but sharp.
He doesn’t remember birthdays. But he remembers every patch of land he ever cleared.
There’s a small stack of twelve hand-forged khurpis beside his door.
He gives them only to those who come back twice.
---
12. Legacy: Kanteppa’s People
In Bidar and beyond, his work lives on—not as monuments, but as movements.
School walls he once cleared are now painted with his words:
“Pull weeds. Plant food. Don’t expect applause.”
Kitchen gardens started with his lessons now feed thousands.
A women’s SHG in Raichur calls themselves “Kanteppa Hennu Sangha”—the women of Kanteppa.
Children draw him in textbooks—bent over, khurpi in hand, a baby on his back.
One mural outside a college reads:
“We are not WhatsApp farmers. We are Kanteppa’s people.”
A man who owned nothing gave generations a sense of ownership—
over soil, food, dignity, and silence.
He never became a politician. He never wrote a book. He never asked to be remembered.
Yet thousands now walk barefoot into their backyards each morning, with a smile, a sickle, and a purpose—because he did.
---
13. Epilogue: His Message to India
Kanteppa doesn’t preach.
But his son, Chenna, keeps a notebook—writing down his father’s one-liners, whispered lessons, and slow truths.
Some of them are now painted on walls. Some read aloud at schools. Some just kept private, for when a gardener feels tired.
Here are a few:
“Weeds are not the problem. Forgetting the soil is.”
“If a child learns to weed, she’ll never beg for food.”
“I don’t remove weeds. I make space for vegetables.”
“I could not remove the weeds from my mother’s grave. So I remove them from the world.”
“Pull one weed. Plant one seed. Teach one child. Then go home quietly.”
This was Kanteppa.
No mic. No fund. No scheme.
Just a khurpi, a rhythm, and a love for what everyone else ignored.
And in that love, the weeds of a nation found a gentle hand.
The One Who Pulled What No One Wanted
— for Kanteppa, the weed remover
they called him
Kale Tegeyo
like a curse
like a rumour
like a village nickname you can't wash off.
not a name
but a sentence —
"the one who removes weeds."
he never corrected them.
they meant it as a joke at first.
then later — as quiet awe.
the kind that has no place
on television.
he was born in Hanumanthvadi
before India had a flag
before villages had names that mattered.
his father
dug in another man’s field
and his mother
fed the cattle of those who never spoke her name.
he never owned land.
but he knew the land better than those who printed maps.
no school.
no gods.
no ceiling fan.
just red mud
and the weeds that came after every monsoon
like shame, like caste, like the voices of the forgotten.
at ten,
he made his first khurpi
from a broken iron plate and a cycle handle
and began cutting grass
outside temples that banned him
outside schools he could never enter
outside walls that didn’t want remembering.
he never asked.
he just pulled.
and when they built gates,
he came the next morning
and weeded behind the wall instead.
at twenty-two, he married.
Neelamma.
quiet eyes. hands made for holding ragi flour.
she died giving birth.
too much blood.
too little help.
same story, different village.
he tied the child to his back
and went back to weeding.
every morning
like prayer
like punishment
like apology.
"Who removes weeds with a baby on his back?"
they laughed.
he didn’t answer.
just moved to the next corner.
no cradle.
just soil.
no lullaby.
just the rasp of the khurpi.
the child, Chenna, grew up
not learning alphabets
but how to listen to roots when they snap.
Kanteppa found a brinjal growing where he had weeded once.
the mulch — dead weeds.
the water — leftover bath water.
the soil — tired, but still breathing.
and that was it.
a revolution with no manifesto.
he taught without chalk.
showed women how to grow bitter gourd in buckets
tomatoes in tyres
greens in broken pots
with weeds for blankets
and no money needed.
the khurpi
became more than a blade.
it became a language
spoken between cracked palms.
he was insulted.
watchmen beat him with sticks.
teachers shooed him away for “disturbing school discipline.”
a municipal officer fined him ₹50 for “unauthorised greening.”
he paid.
smiled.
weeded the other side of the compound wall.
they called him mad.
holy.
irrelevant.
“an old man making the land dirty again.”
he pulled anyway.
because once
he’d gone to find his mother’s grave
and found only grass
and more grass
and silence.
"I didn’t remove the weeds from my mother's grave.
So now I remove them from the world."
that’s what he told the teacher once.
and then never repeated it.
his son grew older.
founded a foundation.
taught thousands.
not in English.
not on Zoom.
just barefoot, standing in kitchen gardens, saying:
"We are Kanteppa’s people."
no tractors.
no pesticides.
no politician’s handshake.
just weeds.
mulch.
grey water.
and children learning to plant instead of pray for food.
Padma Shri came at 99.
he didn’t want to go.
didn’t own a kurta.
his son begged him.
he went barefoot.
carried the khurpi.
bowed.
refused to speak.
his son said instead:
"Appa says removing weeds is his way of removing sorrow."
the audience clapped like it was a TED talk.
he went home
and weeded outside the health centre the next morning.
today
at 100
he still wakes before the birds
pulls weeds from roadsides, school yards, temple fences.
he gives out hand-forged khurpis
only to those who return twice.
his home has no refrigerator.
but his words are now painted on school walls:
> "Pull one weed.
Plant one seed.
Teach one child.
Then go home quietly."
he never asked to be remembered.
but now
he’s in thousands of backyards
disguised as leafy greens.
if you ask him what he achieved
he’ll laugh.
and say,
"I removed what others refused to see.
That’s all. That’s enough."
---
