The story of the farmer from West Khasi Hills who is now an acknowledged strawberry grower, despite being told by the Agriculture and Horticulture Department that the fruit will not grow there, is a lesson to be learnt. Farmers till the soil and know more about it than those sitting at the desks and delivering sermons to farmers. The Agriculture/Horticulture departments need to develop a knowledge bank where indigenous knowledge can be documented and melded with scientific learning. Agricultural graduates from Meghalaya all study outside the state and don’t get to learn much about the soil and weather conditions and other elements that go into making agriculture a viable proposition in their own states It is important for the State Government which regularly deputes students to study Agriculture in outside the state to scan the curriculum and find out the core components missing from there which restricts the graduates to book knowledge. And these agricultural graduates actually provide training to farmers when it should be the other way round. Successful farmers should be talking to other farmers to share their success stories. The platform for such knowledge-sharing should be provided by Government.
India is known for farmers’ suicides which have been documented by writers like P Sainath who has written extensively on farmers’ distress. The Green Revolution with its prescription of applying chemical fertilisers and pesticides had harmed the soil of this country. Governments are now talking about organic farming. This, after agricultural scientists have found that the chemicals in the soil are absorbed by plants which are then ingested by humans and does incalculable harm to their biological system. But detoxifying the soil to get back its purity is a tough call. Besides, there is also the entire nexus of producers of chemical fertilisers and pesticides and those in government agriculture departments that have developed a vested interest in this chain for personal gains.
In Meghalaya, while farmers are not in a similar distress as their counterparts in the rest of the country, they are not doing well either. Their children are giving up farming because it is labour intensive and the returns are not commensurate to the effort invested. The presence of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) in the state has not helped much. Farmers growing citrus fruits like the mandarin oranges have been complaining for several years now that the trees are dying due to fungal attack and some other problems which they think could be connected to the soil or climate change. The ICAR should have done a soil study and also come up with solution for the farmers.
Institutions are created to serve the public, not to generate employment. The ICAR needs to answer to the public about its specific contributions from lab to land and vice versa. There is too little of that happening. Will the Meghalaya Government take note of this?