A team of seven researchers (students) from the University of Michigan (UoM), US, have joined hands with the Telangana Government to educate farmers on applying silt from minor irrigation tanks in their fields and to conduct an impact assessment study on the Mission Kakatiya programme.
A few members of the researchers’ team have already visited the State and done some spade work by holding meetings with farmers in a few villages where the tanks have been identified for de-silting this year and meeting the government functionaries.
The seven students from four schools of UoM are guided by two professors with a funding of $100,000 for taking up the research.
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“We have explained the importance of silt application in the farm-fields to farmers and about accumulation/sale of carbon credits by reducing the use of chemical fertilizers, greenhouse gas emission, in the silt-applied fields to raise international funding to government functionaries,” Adithya Dahagama, a member of the team who is also a native of Khammam district, told
The seven researches working for the international inter-disciplinary project of UoM are from four countries – India, US, Canada and Pakistan. They are drawn from School of Natural Resources and Environment, Ross School of Business, School of Public Health and Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning of UoM. As part of the impact assessment study, the UoM students would evaluate socio-economic, environmental, health, employment generation and sustainability implications of de-silting tanks. Mr. Dahagam said that they had already made impact assessment of a similar project implemented by Freedom, an NGO, in Nalgonda district and found the results to be positive.
“De-silting of irrigation tanks will have multi-faceted benefits including reducing farmers’ dependence on chemical fertilizers,” explains Shamitha Keerthi, another Indian student from UoM.
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