When academics debate on topics ranging from unviable farming to disaster management to climate change, a group of young scientists are slowly working in the fields of Bidar to create a map of natural assets that will serve to be the basis of all development plans in the future.
Personnel from the Sujala team of the College of Horticulture, Bidar, are combing the countryside measuring soil quality and water availability, and documenting them into graphs that can be easily interpreted.
Work is on in over 13,000 hectares in the 19 villages selected for the first phase.
When the project ends in 2018, the team would have surveyed and compiled data of over 62 sites, each of which would stretch between 500 hectares to 1,000 hectares.
This massive effort at data collection and analysis is being taken up under the Sujala watershed development work (phase three) project.
Funded by the World Bank, the project is being jointly implemented by the Agriculture and Horticulture Departments, and the five farm universities of the State.
COH Bidar is a constituent college of University of Horticulture Sciences, Bagalkot.
Field workers are collecting physical data about nutrition in the soil, contours of the land, mode of irrigation, extent of crops and other trees and economic value of the assets on the land.
They are also collecting socio-economic data about the farmers living in the project area.
“The final project report will have data that can help everyone,” says Ashok Alur, special officer, Planning and Monitoring cell of the University of Horticulture Sciences, Bagalkot, who heads the project.
“It will help the government make policies and implement programmes, it will help farmers understand their soil better and grow remunerative crops, and it will help policy makers find solutions to issues like increasing farm productivity and profitability. Such exhaustive data will help governments and civil society to face challenges like climate change,” Dr. Alur added.
Personnel from College of Horticulture, Bidar, are measuring soil quality and water availability in 19 villages selected for the first phase
