UP farmers reap gold as soil gets treated

REBUILDING RURAL INDIA

Amid reports of farmers' suicides and farmland acquisitions, there is some good news from the rural heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh where government intervention has helped farmers improve their earnings. Here is the first of a three-part report...

Shishupal Singh, a small farmer in Bankner village in Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh, never used to bother about the stretch of land his family owned in the village.

It was sodic and unfit for agriculture. Singh eked out a living cultivating another piece of fertile land that the family owned in the village. That was six years ago.

But the Uttar Pradesh Land Reclamation Project, with 70 per cent funding by the World Bank and implemented by the Uttar Pradesh Bhumi Sudhar Nigam (UPBSN), has changed the economic profile of this farmer and thousands like him across the state who had sodic land.

The gypsum treatment and irrigation facilities under the programme have turned his uncultivable sodic lands into green pastures where a paddy crop is swaying now.

"Now I am reaping good profits from this land," says the farmer who is the president of a water user group (WUG) formed in 2000-01 under the $194 million project.

Singh says his earnings from the farm have shown a constant rise in recent years and he was able to invest and expand his work. The project, ending this year, has so far covered 258,000 hectares of sodic land in the state.

The total sodic area in the state before the formulation of the project was 1.15 million hectares. About 5 per cent of the total agriculture area in the whole country is estimated to be sodic.

Sodic lands are a result of high ground water table where high trans-evaporation leads to movement of salts to the surface.

Poor soil and water management add to the problem. The gravity of the problem is evident by the fact that about 92 per cent of sodic lands are owned by small and marginal farmers.

Under the programme, UPBSN assists the sodic land farmers to form WUGs of 5 to 10 people each who would assemble their small pieces of land to form a contiguous stretch of four hectares.

The land is treated with gypsum and provided irrigation through a shallow tube well for every four hectares. A one-time treatment of the land by mixing gypsum in the plots followed by imponding of water for 10 to 12 days drains away the salinity and makes it arable.

"The project carried under two phases has resulted in reclamation of around 258,000 hectares of sodic lands in the state which is 48,000 hectare above the target. Now, on an average, each hectare is yielding 50 quintals of rice and 40 quintals of wheat," Rajesh Kumar Singh, managing director, UPBSN, told Business Standard.

While the UPBSN claims that 92 per cent of the reclamation done under the project in the past decade has been a success, farmers point out that the results are not always uniform.

Besides, the state government is yet to get an approval from the central government for the third phase of the programme which could have covered another 300,000 hectares.

"The proposal is pending with the government and we expect to start it from April next year," UPBSN officials said, adding: "We plan to reclaim all the sodic lands in the state in phases."

The project has, meanwhile, led to regularisation of the patta lands provided to the families among scheduled castes, backward classes and those below the poverty line, besides cutting migration, officials said.

The project has also resulted in the market value of these lands fetching a price never imagined by the villagers. "These lands which were not worth a penny are now fetching us anywhere between Rs 50,000 and 2 lakh per bhiga," Umesh Kumar Singh, a farmer of Bankner said.

"Knowing about the fertility of the lands, even people from places like Haryana are coming here to buy these lands," the villagers said. The funding agency as well as the beneficiaries are happy with the results.