By Jatindra Dash, IANS,
Makhnaha (Uttar Pradesh) : Forty-year-old Ram Naval was struggling to feed his family of seven a couple of years ago as floods kept ruining his crops. Now he has learnt how to adapt.
Makhnaha village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur district, 240 km from state capital Lucknow, still gets flooded almost every year, but some simple innovations have enabled Naval to save his crops from the rising water. All he has done is to build a five-foot-high wooden platform and trail all the climbing and trailing vegetables on it. Now, unless the flood is of unusual severity, the vegetables survive it fine.
Naval’s annual income from his vegetables has gone up to about Rs.20,000 from about Rs.13,000 two years back.
Apart from his raised platform, the trick lay in growing a variety of crops on his four acres of land, rather than just one. That provides insurance — one crop may be destroyed by drought or flood, but another survives, and he doesn’t lose all his money.
“I used to grow vegetables, paddy and wheat but the output was low because of frequent floods and waterlogging,” Naval told this visiting IANS correspondent as his children clustered around. “Now I’m not at so much risk any more.”
Risk-proofing crops is becoming more and more important as droughts and floods increase in both frequency and severity, one of the consequences of global warming, according to scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It becomes essential in the Himalayan foothills region north of the Ganga, where 90 percent of working people are farmers, and 80 percent of them are landless or small and marginal farmers.
Makhnaha farmers have a worse time than others because the embankments on the Rohin river that flows past the village are dilapidated. There is no drainage once the river overflows
and all the 3,421 people in the village have been facing waterlogging.
An NGO called Gorakhpur Environmental Action group (GEAG) has been guiding farmers since 1985 on how to optimise farm output under these circumstances. It has been training small and marginal farmers throughout Uttar Pradesh, especially on sustainable livelihoods in flood-affected areas.
“We have to change,” said another Makhnaha villager, Rajendra Prasad, 45. “Nowadays we don’t even know when to sow our winter wheat. Earlier we used to do it when the migratory birds started to arrive. But the birds have not been coming for the last two years.
“There is no chill in the winter. As a result, traditional varieties of winter wheat are not doing well. Now we have started sowing a new variety of wheat called 154 Kundan that can withstand heat.”
GEAG has also taught the farmers mixed cropping, multilayered cropping, vegetable production, nursery raising, use of fast-growing varieties of paddy such as NDR-97 and Turanta.
“We know natural disasters such as floods cannot be stopped, but the magnitude of damage caused by them can be controlled with appropriate interventions,” GEAG president Shiraz A. Wajih told IANS.
“Using our methods, the cost of inputs in agriculture has decreased and incomes have increased,” he added.
GEAG has guided at least 35,000 farmers in the three districts of Gorakhpur, Maharajganj and Sant Kabir Nagar. Around 6,000 farmers have already started experiencing the benefits.
Seeing the performance of farmers like Ram Naval and Rajinder Prasad, others have started taking interest in the new methods of cultivation.
(Jatindra dash can be contacted at [email protected])