Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI: Scanty rainfall and the lack of adequate irrigation facilities have left the farmers of the state in the lurch as they cannot sow paddy seedlings in their fields. While some farmers are spending money on their own to irrigate their lands, others are taking to folk beliefs like arranging frog marriages to appease the Rain God.
Assam is basically an agrarian state where the Agriculture and Irrigation departments have utterly failed to perform. The gross crop area in the state is 52.75 lakh hectares, and the area sown is 27.56 lakh hectares. The department needs to irrigate these areas, but they utterly failed to perform this job. The plan is to irrigate 17 lakh hectares of land through minor irrigation schemes and 10 lakh hectares of land through major and medium irrigation schemes. Apart from these, the Agriculture Department installs shallow tube wells for irrigation purposes.
The affected areas in this dry spell are Nalbari, Tihu, Kamalpur, Dhing, Barpeta, etc. The lack of water has dried up nursery beds of paddy seedlings, besides parching the arable land. Most of the irrigation schemes in these areas are lying defunct.
According to official statistics, at present 2,982 irrigation schemes are functioning, and irrigation potential of 3.75 lakh hectares is available. In the past four years, 377 new minor irrigation projects creating 12,210 hectares of irrigation potential were added, and 9,662 shallow tube wells were installed to provide assured irrigation facilities in 38,848 hectares of land.
According to sources, the state has centrally aided the state governments' irrigation schemes, apart from new schemes with solar power. However, for reasons best known to the department, the irrigation facilities are yet to pick up pace in the state. The previous governments set up several irrigation schemes without studying their feasibility. Many such schemes have been lying defunct. The lack of funds required for their operations and maintenance has complicated the problems.
"Towards the goal of increasing cropping intensity and raising crop yield, provisioning of irrigation is a prime necessity. The government needs to lay utmost stress on this," an official source said.
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