Ranchi: Simdega, which hit national headlines last September for an 11-year-old Dalit girl Santoshi Kumari's alleged starvation death, and has been facing problems in paddy cultivation due to less than satisfactory rainfall so far this year, sees hope in the form of 10 stars.

The district administration has trained over 30,000 women associated with livelihood mission programme to farm using what is being called 10-star technology.

These new technologies don't involve capital investment, but include line sowing and transplantation, compost and other biofertiliser manufacturing, among others, in low-lying areas.

Simdega DC Jata Shankar Choudhary said, "Sowing of groundnut, black gram, bean gram and pigeon pea in particular have nearly been completed in all low-lying villages. Paddy sowing has begun. But, as we are not getting enough rainfall yet, transplantation has not begun on a large scale," Choudhary, who on Friday toured remote villages of Kurdeg block in Simdega and helped farmers sow paddy in "ankle-deep muddy water".

Known for long as Jharkhand's hockey cradle, ST-dominated Simdega, which borders Odisha and Chhattisgarh, was till recently a rebel hotbed. The district with a 599,578 population has 451 villages, 94 panchayats and 10 blocks.