N’PADA FARMERS DON’T BOW TO MONSOON VAGARIES

Sunday, 04 October 2015 | AJIT PANDA | NUAPADA | in Bhubaneswar

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Harising Chinda, a small farmer of Chhuinpani village, will get a good harvest of paddy this year from his two acres of land in spite of the scanty rainfall during the current monsoon.

He had organised his fellow villagers to construct a diversion wire across the stream ‘Dhusab’ to divert water to a small patch of about 25 acres of rice field. The structure here is a stone bund, which starts from the one end of the stream and runs diagonally up to the mouth of the canal.

There is no use of cement mortar, thus grass and soil have been put to seal the gaps. “We don’t need big projects, small structures like this are sufficient,” says Harising, adding, “It needs only 3 to 4 full days’ of work for 10 persons to make this bund and food for a whole year for 9 households of our village assured.”

Jaldhar Chinda, father of Harising, had made a stone bund across the stream “Vensa” a decade ago.  The structure provided irrigation to more than 100 acres for a few years, until it was washed away in a flash flood. “Rain is unpredictable these days. Sometimes it rains heavily and water flow increases in the stream and the stone bunds are washed away,” says Chaitan Chinda of the village. “A permanent concrete structure is needed in Vensa,” he adds.

Sobharam Chinda of Kholi village, however, thinks that there are alternatives. He is against permanent plugging of streams. He has been making bund with stone staking every year across the stream Indra. Water is diverted through a canal of half km length to a small reservoir. The distributor canal (about 2 km long) takes water of the reservoir to the rice fields. More than 30 acres are irrigated. It took two years for Sobharam and his villagers to construct the reservoir and the canal. “It is very difficult to stake stone across the stream every year as it is very wide. It will cost more if we think of a concrete one; thus I am thinking of using a big iron mesh to wrap the stones so that it would not be wash away in flash flood,” he says. Sobharam had approached the Minor Irrigation Department for some financial support to materialise his idea, but the department officials expressed their helplessness. “We cannot build any structure in the forest area,” the Executive Engineer had said bluntly.

There may be many such places in remote hilly areas of Nuapada, where such innovations can be tried. But such ideas are not given importance, perhaps because our Governments are not run by people like Harising or Sobharam.

Such projects are proposed in the Palli Sabhas and Gram Sabhas by people, but most of them are rejected by our highly educated engineers and officials on various technical grounds, opine an activist.