drying up

Agartala, May 2: Tripura’s ambition to achieve self-sufficiency in agricultural produce has taken a beating with shrinking cultivable land, labour shortage and farmers’ reluctance to stick to traditional occupation emerging as the primary spoilsports.

The enormity of the problem has recently come to the fore with the state government revising targets of the 10-year (2001-2010) perspective plan for achieving self-sufficiency in agricultural production.

The decision to extend the plan by two more years — up to 2012 — was taken at a meeting of the state cabinet on April 13.

According to statistics made available by the officials of agriculture department, 255,241 hectares of land in the state are under cultivation on paper, but since 2006, the area under agriculture has been steadily declining.

“Actually in 2005, altogether 1,819 acres of land had been added to the area under cultivation but since then it has been declining from year to year; in 2006-2007 the rate of reduction in land for agriculture had been recorded at 19,772 acres followed by 1,430 acres next year and in 2008-2009 it had been recorded at 12,110 acres,” a source said.

There has also been a virtual loss of 12,000 hectares of land for agricultural purposes because of their location beyond the fencing along the Indo-Bangladesh border and a further loss of land on account of a 12-ft wide border road flanked on both sides by 3ft-wide drains.

“The traditional farming community has started moving away from paddy cultivation to cash crops like vegetables which has also affected production; in the hilly areas more and more people have started going for largescale rubber cultivation, creating shortage in food items,” an official in the agriculture department said.

Officials also pointed out that implementation of the national rural job scheme or NREGA was standing in the way of labour availability at different stages of cultivation as traditional agricultural labourers find it much more convenient to put in nominal work for two or three hours and pocket Rs 100 each.

“The most critical part is irrigation because despite hard efforts made over the past decade as part of the perspective plan, only 36 per cent of total agricultural land or 93,569 hectares are currently under assured irrigation, the rest depends on the vagaries of monsoon,” the source said.

The constraints of irrigation are reflected in the decline in land with multiple cropping across the state.

“In the year 2006-2007, altogether 56,597 hectares of land had been under three cropping a year but this had declined to 47,622 hectares in 2007-2008 but there was a precipitous fall in 2008-2009 when only 36,441 hectares of land produced three crops,” the source said.

The cumulative effect of all this has been the continuing gap between food production and requirement despite the stimulated growth plan-ned as part of the perspective plan.

The state’s current food requirement is 9,60,000 tonnes but the production in the last financial year had been recorded at 6,06,780 tonnes. The shortfall was made up by withdrawals from the FCI quota. Sources, however, said the production figures were “fudged” as “actual production” would be much less.

“What continues to be the fundamental problem is the approach to agricultural growth. In the ongoing 11th Five Year plan, Tripura’s agricultural growth had been fixed at only 1.4 per cent compared with 8.4 per cent in Nagaland, 2 per cent in Assam and 1.6 per cent in Mizoram though Manipur is behind us with only 1.2 per cent targeted growth,” said leader of the Opposition Ratanlal Nath, quoting from the official publication of the Planning Commission.

He said in a recent discussion with the Planning Commission over the size of Tripura’s annual plan, chief minister Manik Sarkar had pressed for inclusion of all four districts of Tripura under the Backward Region Grant Fund (BRGF) meant for most backward districts of the state.

“Currently, only Dhalai district is under the BRGF and the government had received Rs 25.26 lakh grant but could spend only Rs 6 lakh. So there is no reason to believe in the Marxist propaganda of lies and concoctions,” Nath said.

He also expressed misgivings over the implementation of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in Tripura for increased paddy production.

Baharul Islam Mazumder, senior agronomist of state agriculture department and member of the National Food Security Mission who had pioneered paddy cultivation under the SRI method, said farmers in Tripura were showing interest in adopting and implementing the method for increased production.

“This method had been invented by French missionary Fr Henry Lolani in Malagassy after experimenting with farmers there for more than 30 years. Under this method, cultivation is done in six phases and production level is very high compared with traditional methods,” Baharul said, adding the SRI method had been implemented first in 2004 for kharif crop experimentally on 50 hectares of land. In the current financial year, 85,000 hectares would be under SRI method for paddy cultivation.

Baharul said self-sufficiency in food production could be achieved only by applying the SRI method accurately all over the state, but regretted that lack of adequate staff to introduce and train farmers in method was hindering the progress of the system.

“Our department needs at least 1,394 village-level workers to train and familiarise peasants with the new method but we have to manage with only 650 village-level workers; with adequate manpower and technical support we can bring about major changes in the food production profile of Tripura after Andhra Pradesh where the method was applied first, ” Baharul said.