Multi-cropping, laying tiers of vegetation and harvesting rainwater demonstrate that innovative strategies could make Palamau synonymous with plenty

Palamau and poverty have been synonymous for decades. The district, much of which falls under a rain-shadow area, consists of barren land, parched earth and vegetation that is more grey than green. It is of course an irony because Palamau also has the Betla National Park and the Tiger Reserve.

But both land and water continue to be scarce and thereby precious. The district is seen to have suffered a minor drought at intervals of three years. A more severe drought is witnessed at 7 year intervals and the district reels with a major drought after gaps of 13 years or so.

For survival people either migrate to other parts of the country or depend on the shrubs and forests to dole out something in the form of leaves, wild berries and timber.

A NGO christened as Society of Hill Resource Management School (SHRMS), launched by a group of forest officials and university teachers way back in 1984, has demonstrated that innovative strategies could make Palamau synonymous with plenty. The scheme was launched to cover 40 villages in five blocks of Palamau division and today caters to 2,000 families.

Recalls Prof S.P. Sinha, “When we started, economic and ecological conditions were alarming; social cohesiveness was missing and there was total distrust among villagers and most of the people were on the verge of starvation. It needed sustained efforts to motivate villagers and persuade them to work together. It was obviously even more difficult to convince them that their lot could change through collective efforts. They were encouraged and helped to develop forests, and promised that they would share the benefit, and were trained to harvest water and store rainwater.”

Today, just standing trees in the project villages are estimated to be worth more than Rs 3,900 lakh or Rs 39 crore. Productivity of land has also increased and the NGO claims that at Sakanpirhi village only 5 quintals of onion were grown in 1990. But today the same village is said to produce 10,000 quintals of onion. Using the existing land and water as a common pool, villagers were trained to work together to increase productivity and share the spoils.

Every village, with approximately 100 families and 200 to 300 acres of land, was taken as an independent unit. Village-level meetings were followed by an exchange programme, under which villagers visited other villages to share their experience. Gradually they were initiated to multi-cropping, laying tiers of vegetation and harvesting rainwater.

Economic self-reliance of the unit remained the objective as plans were formulated to create assets, determine the cropping pattern, secondary products and creation of job opportunities.

A Chakriya Vikas Vidyalaya (CVV) was set up with one member drawn from from each family. This body was entrusted the task of taking common decisions, share benefits equally and so on. A management committee was elected and sub-committees formed for various functions; of them the prominent ones were the social audit committee, vigilance committee, accounts committee, Mahila Mandal and so on. A village development fund, a students’ fund and a separate fund for land-owners’ share were created.

The returns from the land and assets were shared in a particular ratio. Thirty per cent was deposited into the village development fund; 30 per cent was distributed to the land owners; 30 per cent more was deposited into the students’ or the householders’ fund while 10 per cent was sought to be ploughed back into productive work.

Sustained efforts bore fruit and migration of people was reduced to a trickle. Consequently incidence of physical abuse of women also came down substantially. Every family benefitted.

The landless secured employment; the land owners got the benefit of increased productivity and other members of the society, students and women for example, were also rewarded for their respective contributions. Above all, social tension went down significantly.

SHRMS constructed more than 80 ponds, around 100 big and small low-cost check dams and undertook innovative soil conservation programme in over 2,700 hectares of land.

The Village Development Fund managed to raise Rs 15 lakhs, half of which has been used by the community to support people who needed the safety-net. The fund thus spared villagers the inevitability of falling prey to rapacious money-lenders.

Although the Joint Forest Management ( JFM) programme in both Bihar and Jharkhand has incorporated some of the mechanisms of the project, specially in relation to profit-sharing, lamented Sinha, the project has received scant support from the state government. Generally, he said, the attitude of the government to the project, the NGO and the people involved has been rather ‘negative’.

The Chakriya Vikas Yojana of SHRMS is believed to be an improvement on the common property resource management promoted by the forest department at Slikhomajri. From “common property”, it became a “common pool” management.

The SHRMS exercise was inspired by the vision of Padmashri P.R. Mishra, who knew the difficult ground realities of Palamau but was nevertheless determined to provide a lasting solution to poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, economic disparity and ecological imbalance.

Faith in the potency of Mother Earth and a vision of self-reliance at the village level drove the dream. Professor Sinha points out that the experiment has helped reclaim land, improve soil fertility and increase crop productivity and deserves to be studied at greater depth and replicated elsewhere.