The new Kalahandi: a summary of its progress and rice production

Following report is from http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-new-kalahandi/1126780/0

Standing in his paddy field that glistened in the afternoon sun, farmer Gouranga Rana had his worries: What would happen to his bumper harvest? Would he be able to sell it at the minimum support price announced by the state government? But the FCI godown was already full.

These are concerns any farmer would have. What makes Rana’s problem—and that of others in Bandigaon village in Jaypatna block—a happy one is that his village is part of Kalahandi, once a name that stood for hunger in one of the country’s most deprived regions. Now, as the Union Agriculture Ministry announced last month, Kalahandi ranks among the top 25 rice-producing districts of India.

Till the early 2000s, starvation deaths and distress migration were the norm here, with reports of families in distress selling off their children. One of the cases that made headlines was in 1985, when a 14-year-old tribal girl, Bonita, was sold by her sister-in-law, Phanas Punji, for Rs 40 so that she could feed her two starving children. Shocked, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi visited the district and announced a development package called the KBK (Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) Development Scheme for the district. Like all government packages, this scheme was forgotten as funds dried up.

The change came in the form of the Upper Indravati Multipurpose Project, first conceived of in 1987-88. Since 2000, water from the project has reached six of the 13 blocks of Kalahandi, leaving in its wake green fields that this district could once only dream of. Of Kalahandi’s cultivated area of 1.9 lakh hectares, the project irrigates over 76,400 hectares. There are plans to extend the project to cover an additional 6,000 hectares in Golamunda block.

Kalahandi farmers now have two crop seasons every year. “It’s an unbelievable change. Nothing short of a miracle,” says Orissa’s Director of Agriculture and Food Production R Sant Gopalan who, till a few years ago, was the district magistrate of Kalahandi. “It shows what government irrigation and improved farm input can do to the fortunes of a region despised for its backwardness.”

“Water was all that Kalahandi needed and once it came, there was no looking back,” says Ashok Patnaik of local NGO Karrtabya.

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Rana would know. Till about 12 years ago, Rana’s father used to get a meagre harvest of 23 quintals of paddy during monsoons on their six-acre land. “It was tough for us to survive then,” says Rana. Last year, he harvested around 60 quintals from his land during the rabi season alone despite pest attacks. “Now I have a pucca house. I can afford good education for my children,” says Rana, who has studied till class XII.

Like several thousand farmers in Kalahandi, he now grapples with a problem of plenty. The three-year average of Kalahandi’s rice production ending 2010-11 was 4,68,000 tonnes, compared with the three-year average of 82,000 tonnes for 1998-99. The year 2012-13 saw a new high, with rice production in the kharif season touching 4.89 lakh tonnes, with rabi expected to yield another 1.85 lakh tonnes, making it a total of 6.74 lakh tonnes, a record for Kalahandi so far. The per hectare yield in Kalahandi in 2012-13 has crossed 40 quintals, compared to the modest state average of 34.88 quintals.

With lush paddy fields on either side, a drive along the leafy stretch of National Highway No. 201 as it passes through Junagarh block is a pleasure, even in the searing summer. The picture isn’t any different in the blocks of Jaypatna, Koksara and Dharmagarh.

Chaitanya Nayak of Bandigaon village harvested 140 quintals of paddy on his seven acres in the last rabi season, double his produce in the previous kharif season. Ten years ago, he would have probably migrated out in search of a job. Nayak, a matriculate, says, “Earlier, we would often go hungry during the rabi season. Now most of the houses have refrigerators, coolers, dish antenna and motorcycles. In the last 10 years, I don’t remember seeing a dry paddy field in my area,” says Nayak, who rides a Hero Passion motorcycle and does aquaculture in a small pond besides his house. With water available in plenty, all the 300-odd families in Bandigaon have taken to farming in a big way.

Kalahandi’s transformation into the state’s rice-bowl has led to reverse migration, with rich farmers from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh now putting their money in the district’s fertile tracts. G Sreenu from East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh owns 20 acres in Dulukibandh village of Kalampur block and last year, reaped 1,100 quintals of paddy. He now has a three-bedroom house on the main road.

There are other visible signs of change. Last year, the first government engineering college came up in Kalahandi, one of only a dozen in the state.

District collector Govind Sethi says he has no doubt that the change is for real. “Though we will have to wait for the latest Census results to validate the change, the signs are all there. More children go to school, the district has seen more progress in education. The focus has shifted from hunger to better things,” he says.

Farm mechanisation has also taken off in a big way. Kalahandi has more power tillers (2,500) than any other Orissa district. With labourers in short supply, farmers are now renting expensive combined harvesters for Rs 2,300 an hour to harvest paddy.

As Kalahandi’s new fame has spread out, traders from Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are bringing in hundreds of automated paddy threshers to the district. From a handful of rice processing mills 10 years ago, now there are 82 active rice mills in Kalahandi. With so much paddy being produced, FCI, which had one paddy procurement centre in 1996, now has 50 centres in the district.

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Kalahandi’s Congress MP Bhakta Charan Das, who is credited with getting water from Indravati to the district’s fields, says the success in farm production, coupled with more government spending in the roads and health sectors, have helped Kalahandi turn the corner. It also helped that the state government pitched in with crop loans and supplied quality seeds.

“The kind of poverty we had 15 years ago now seems a distant memory. Almost all the villages have good roads under government schemes. Most people have two-wheelers and every other house would have a dish antenna. Starvation is a thing of the past,” says Das. Besides, there are 10-12 branches of nationalised and private banks in the blocks. Prosperous blocks like Junagarh and Jaypatna now boast of half-a-dozen automobile showrooms.

Kalahandi’s long wait for a railway link with the state capital got over last year with a 30-km track between Lanjigarh and the main headquarter town of Bhawanipatna. Das now hopes the Bhawanipatna-Junagarh link would be through soon, giving farmers in the Junagarh sub-division a chance to take their produce by trains and get a better deal.

Rana, the farmer in Jaypatna block, says people in Kalahandi now have the blessing of “two Indras”. “There is Lord Indra during monsoons and then the Indravati project in the winter and summer seasons. We are indeed blessed.”

Jayalal Padhi, deputy director of agriculture of Junagarh sub-division, the area which has benefited the most from the project, recounts how his friends used to tease him as “Kalahandia” (man from Kalahandi) during his college days in neighbouring Bolangir district. “We used to be embarrassed then. Now if someone calls us Kalahandia, it’s a matter of pride,” he says.

 The Indravati project

Though initially estimated at Rs 208 crore in 1987-88, the project which dams the Indravati river and its tributaries to form a massive reservoir atop the mountains in Thuamul-Rampur block of Kalahandi, has now escalated to more than Rs 3,000 crore.

From the reservoir, water is transferred to Hati river in the Mahanadi river basin which then irrigates six of the 13 blocks of Kalahandi through a maze of canals and sub-canals running to hundreds of kilometres. The construction of the 52 km-long main left canal from the project’s barrage at Mangalpur ended in December last year while the main right canal with a length of 84 km is expected to end by March 2015.

 Green, but how green?

The water gushing into Kalahandi’s fields has brought with it problems of a different kind. While earlier, farmers used to grow pulses and millets such as ragi during the rabi season, most of them now grow only paddy throughout the year. “Kalahandi can have 35-40 types of crops a year. But the lack of crop diversification has led to a decline in soil quality and texture. So farmers have to use more fertilisers to retain productivity levels,” says Ashok Patnaik of local NGO Karrtabya.

Though more water has led to more productivity, it has also made the crops vulnerable to pest attacks and diseases. “For small farmers like us, it is difficult to survive by spending so much on paddy. Every year we have to deal with some kind of diseases,” says marginal farmer Uddhaba Sahu of Mangalpur village.

With labourers preferring to work under NREGA, farmhands are in short supply. Farmers like Sahu say they can’t afford the steep cost of automated farm equipment. Rising paddy production has also meant that farmers are forced to sell their produce below the minimum support price of Rs 1,250 for every quintal of paddy.

Without a planned drainage system, some areas face waterlogging. For the last several years, Indravati project officials had no schedule for water discharge and they continued to release water even when farmers did not need it. But this has been resolved to an extent since last year, with water flowing through canals and sub-canals. With fields hardly left to dry due to the continous irrigation, the area stinks during the monsoon as people defecate in the open.

Rising mechanisation has also led to a sharp drop in livestock population. With depleting livestock, farmers are dumping the straw into the irrigation canals, choking them.

The Land Ceiling Act has not stopped rich farmers from Andhra Pradesh from coming to Kalahandi and buying up lands of small and marginal farmers whom the irrigation project was meant to benefit. With farm input costs going up, many fear that small-time farmers would end up selling their land to the land sharks.

Officials say Kalahandi can be among India’s top-10 rice producing districts and yet not lose its soil quality if farmers are open to newer methods of cultivation. “One modern system of rice-growing is the System of Rice Intensification. Under SRI, farmers sow a small number of seeds and then transplant them into fields one by one, while controlling the water input. Through SRI, the productivity can go up by 30-40 per cent,” says Orissa’s Director of Agriculture and Food Production R Sant Gopalan.

Life expectancy of Indravati dam

Following is a report from the Samaja:

How Odisha govt. betrayed the people of western Odisha: An article by Uttam Kumar Pradhan

Following report is from the Sambad:

 

Kalahandi’s flood: a manmade disaster?

Following report is from The Dharitri:

Water holding capacity of the Indrabati dam is decreasing: A from The Samaj

Following is a report from The Samaj Oriya daily (29.07.2010):

Hirakud Dam related news:India needs bill on dam safety – and fast

Following is a report by IANS taken from Yahoo news:

New Delhi, May 6 (IANS) With India having over 4,700 dams – the third largest number in the world – of which about 100 are more than a century old, a parliamentary panel has suggested the expeditious legislation concerning dam safety.

The Standing Committee on Water Resources, in its report submitted to parliament, said the government should introduce the Dam Safety Bill, 2010 in the budget session.

It said the legislation will help states adopt uniform dam safety norms and provide for proper surveillance, inspection and maintenance of dams of certain parameters.

The committee, headed by Beni Prasad Verma, said the ministry of water resources (MoWR) had informed it that the bill was expected to be introduced in the budget session. The Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal assemblies have passed resolutions empowering parliament to pass the dam safety bill.

According to the National Register of Large Dams, the country has 4,711 completed dams while around 390 are under construction.

Pointing out that there were 477 projects that had spilled over to the 11th Five Year Plan, the committee said some of these have been under execution for the past 50 years or more.

‘The committee desires that the MoWR should take concrete steps so that the spilled over projects, particularly of distant Five Year Plans, are completed during the Eleventh Plan period,’ the report said.

Expressing concern over the ‘tardy pace of execution’ of structures for artificial recharge of water, the committee said the MoWR should pursue the matter with greater vigour with states.

‘Against a target of 794 artificial recharge structures during the 11th Plan, only 121 structures have been completed whereas half the term of the plan is over,’ the committee noted.

It expressed unhappiness over non-achievement of targets for irrigation potential under the ambitious Bharat Nirman programme of the government.

Against the aim of creating irrigation potential of 10 million hectares (Mha) in four years (2005-06 to 2008-09), 7.31 Mha was created till March 2009, the committee said.

The need for legislation has been repeatedly emphasised by the National Committee on Dam Safety (NCDS), set up in 1987 with the membership of all states and organisations having a significant number of large dams.

While maintenance of the dams is the responsibility of the state governments and dam owners, a Dam Safety Organisation (DSO) was established at the Central Water Commission in May 1979 to develop guidelines for inspection of dams, check lists and other dam safety literature which has also been provided to the states.

The committee also said all information relating to water flow, contamination of surface and groundwater should be collated and ‘put under a suitable template for easy access of all’.

The report of the committee was presented to the Lok Sabha April 20 and tabled in the Rajya Sabha the same day.

Left canal of Indravati dam near Kasibahal, Kalahandi broke out; Spreads resentment among the farmers

Following is a report from The Samaja:

Reports related to Indravati project

• Project Indravati: Phase I. An appraisal of the natural resources of the Indravati basin, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, India : DOI: 10.1080/01431168508948470

Abstract: Project Indravati has been taken up to demonstrate the capabilities of remote-sensing data for the exploration of natural resources and also the structural linkages necessary to evolve a National Natural Resources Management System (NNRMS). The Geological Survey of India, the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization and the Forest Survey of India are the collaborating agencies under this project. The National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land-use Planning has supplied data on soils of the area. This densely forested, undercultivated region with a relatively virgin status in mineral exploration offers ample scope for using remote-sensing techniques in evaluating its natural resource potential.
Data on geology, structure and lineaments, geomorphology, drainage, soil and vegetation were compiled and collated, based on visual interpretation of LANDSAT imagery. The area has a complex physiographic and geological history and varied soil types. Vegetation is mostly mixed deciduous types.

Two test areas, which are relatively remote and difficult to approach, have been selected for detailed aerial and multispectral scanner survey for the assessment of natural resources. Complete article is available here.

• Indravati side effects hit KBK

While major hydro irrigation project of Upper Indravati (UIHP) has brought cheers to the farmers of KBK region but its side effects are harming them more. Dr. Digamabara Patra, a leading Non Resident Oriya (NRO) who belongs to this backward region have analyzed in great details. Decade long operations of UIHP has provided irrigation facility and benefited a large number of farmers in the backward KBK region resulting boost in the economy of the local and the state.

The state government is richer by hundreds of crore rupees annually by selling power to the neighboring state. However, the negative side effects from this project from infrastructure and health count is creating appalling situation for the common men.

Opening of various channels to irrigate agricultural farm land has brought various deadly water born diseases in the form of Tuberculosis, Malaria, Brain fever to the region directly affecting the local mass.

However health facilities in this region are in a state of despair. And new born water diseases have added to their owes, allege the villagers. Serious staff shortage in the Community Health Centers (CHC) and Primary Health Centers (PHC) coupled with shortage of technical expertise as well as proper medical diagnostic instruments has further worsened the situation. Read the complete report here.

• Orissa CM inaugurates Upper Indravati project canal

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Saturday visited Kalahandi district  and inaugurated the Aqueduct (canal) of Upper Indravati Irrigation Project at Chhilpa.

The Chief Minister also laid the foundation of Government engineering college, proposed Government agriculture college here and a 132/33 KV grid substation at Bhangabari. Addressing the public in Police Barrack ground, the Chief Minister said Rs 5 crore each have already been sanctioned for both the projects. Patnaik went to Dharamgarh and addressed the people at Panchayat Ground after inaugurating the Town Hall.

The Chief Minister also inaugurated the new school building of Kendriya Vidyalaya here. The Chief Minister also visited Tulapada College and addressed the Bikash Samavesh at the college ground.

Bhawanipatna MLA Pradipta Naik, Kalahandi MP Bikram Kesari Deo, Balabhadra Majhi, Kiran Singh Deo also spoke. Meanwhile, members of the District Youth Congress, led by president Abdul Sazid, blocked the road while CM was going to address a meeting in the Police Barrack demanding a Central University in the district. However, the police cleared the road. More than 50 Congress activists were arrested. This report is taken from Orissa diary.

Information about Indravati hydro-power project

Following information is taken from http://web.worldbank.org:

Construction of a 600-megawatt hydro-electric power station comprising four 150-megawatt turbogenerator sets, a 110-sq km reservoir, four dams and eight dykes, together with associated channels, tunnels, shafts and penstocks, in the Koraput and Kalahandi districts of the State of Orissa, and provision of associated engineering and administrative services. The tail waters from the power station will provide a capability for the irrigation of about 109,000 hectares in the vicinity of the plant. Read more about Indravati hydro power project here.