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Casestudy : |
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Land
Degradation - Casestudy
Punjab:
India's granary and a success story of the Green Revolution?
Farmers raking in fortunes through modern technologies and hard
work? A model for the rest of India and the world? That perhaps
was the picture some time ago. Today, however, it is a story
of degraded soil, depleted water tables, reduced productivity,
and farmer suicides. How did things change so quickly?
Here, let us listen to some of the farmers about the Punjab
situation.
As the sun sets on the sepia-coloured horizon, Ram Pal sits
alone to tell his story. 'Let the land open wide and swallow
us up. My nine acres have become unproductive due to waterlogging.
The fields are full of wild grass. I have a family of three
to feed and a debt of Rs 50,000 to repay,' laments the 60-year-old
farmer from Kalalwala village in Punjab's Bhatinda district.
Now Ram Pal goes to the nearby town every day to work as a labourer.
Like many farmers, he has been caught in the vortex of Punjab's
agricultural crisis. Today, many farmers living in one of India's
richest granaries are in danger of losing their livelihood,
as agricultural lands are slowly turning barren due to farming
practices aimed at increasing yields to meet demand.
Since the soil has lost its natural capacity to nourish the
crops, we have to keep on adding fertilizers. Naturally, the
cost of production is going up,' says Jitender Pal Singh, a
farmer in Ropar district.
Sardul Singh is in his late 60's and has a classic peasant face
with his life story written in the lines on it. I asked him
if they applied compost to their soil. His answer was, 'Sadly,
much less than we should and can. You see, one of my sons raises
buffalos and we have that huge hill of dung unappreciated and
slowly losing value. I keep reminding my sons to use it up,
but they don't. Their indifference to this valuable material
is surprising, for they know the good it will do to the soil.
In our time we would quickly pick up any amount of compost or
raw dung available to us and make the best use of it. But today's
youth are used to spreading fertilizers; their noses cannot
bear the smell of cow dung. Also, they have grown lazy. We used
to work twice as hard and never complained. Times have changed!' |
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