Desalination of farms needs attention

After the announcement of the desalination plant for Chennai in the Union Budget to alleviate the city's acute drinking water shortage problem, it is the desalination of agricultural land because of the tsunami that the most avidly discussed issue in Tamil Nadu today.

The question addresses the problems of some 2,000 acres of prime agricultural land that was engulfed by the waves of the tsunami.

After sea water came into the paddy fields, farmers judge the fields to have become infertile and unfit for farming. This could not have normally been such a problem. But the land in questions belongs to the Thanjavur-Thiruvarur "rice bowl", the circle of the most fertile land in the state close to the Cauvery estuary.

With an average annual rice yield touching 6.5 lakh metric tonnes during 1991-92, the district tops all the other districts of India in the production of rice.

But since then there has been an unremitting drought and the already poverty-stricken people of the delta simply cannot afford to consign another 2,000 acres to wasteland.

The question is how to reclaim the land. One solution is to "wash" the fields with gypsum three or four times. But that will bring down the fertility of the land.

It is solutions to problems like this which could have done with technical assistance from abroad that politicians in the state believe, have been foreclosed by the Centre's assertion that it did not need foreign help in tacking the tsunami crisis.

The State government is using all the scientific and technical resources available to it to understand and apply technology in desalination. If agencies are engaged in this research, it would like to hear from them, state government officials say.