Kerala's Vadakkekara panchayat turns recurrent adversities into opportunity

Floods, COVID-19 spur Vadakkekara to engage in farming to ensure food security

Upland paddy farming has found much favour among residents of Vadakkekkara this year. The panchayat had suffered great losses in flooding in 2018 and 2019.

If the people of Vadakkekara panchayat learnt anything from the floods of 2018 and 2019, it is that there is no time like now to do good work.

They have turned adversity into an opportunity in writing a new chapter in green, bring all of the cultivable land in the panchayat under various crops. That Vadakkekara was declared a fallow landless panchayat in early August is just one aspect of the initiatives being taken by Kudumbashree groups, women under the national employment guarantee scheme and the four primary service cooperative banks.

An official of the department of agriculture said that while 110 acres were brought under cultivation after lying fallow for several years, the range of experiments being carried out was a good example.

The crops being tried out in Vadakkekara include corn and ragi; medicinal rice varieties like Njavara and Raktasali as well as sweet tuber crops under the guidance of the Central Tuber Crop Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram.

The tuber cultivation initiative, “Madhura Gramam”, has seen 8,000 sweet potato cuttings being distributed to 1,600 to 2,000 households in the panchayat. In the second phase, all the 11,000 homes will be given the tuber crop cuttings.

Red lady papaya cultivation in the panchayat.

 

Panchayat president K. M. Ambrose said almost the entire lot of 11,000 houses in the panchayat went under flood waters in 2018 and many were affected in 2019. People had learnt a lesson, he said from the troubling experience, which prompted them to answer the call for food sufficiency under the “Subhiksha Keralam” banner in the wake of COVID-19 lockdown.

The panchayat now has around 1,000 hectares under various crops. Once known only for small patches of vegetable fields and dominated by homestead coconut groves, Vadakkekara has seen a revolutionary transformation. “Every single plot has turned into a place for growing vegetables, bananas, and even upland paddy”, said an official.

More than 800 hectares are under coconut cultivation; 10 hectares under nutmeg, 15 hectares under banana, 10 hectares under tapioca, about 10 hectares under vegetable crops and eight hectares under conventional tuber crops.

In another initiative, around 6,000 seedlings of the Red Lady variety of papaya were distributed in the panchayat as part of the continuing efforts to diversify crops.