15.5.16

Somewhere near Warangal....


Just about 70 kilometres from Warangal city, residents of Devagiripatnam, a village with a population of 2,700 are among the very few in Telangana who are not worried about drought. Not just that, they also raise two crops a year. Making all this possible are a large number of ponds dug by the villagers in their fields that harvest rainwater .And, when not raising crops, some of these farmers use their little ponds to grow fish for sale in nearby local markets. “There are nearly 250 such small ponds in the village,“ sarpanch Vankudotu Chandi said.
A farmer herself, Chandi said the village began suffering acute water shortage some 60 years ago. “Not a single politician has tried to understand our plight. The entire agriculture is dependent on rains and the water we store in our ponds. There is also an acute shortage of drinking water. Had it not been for Balavikasa (a local NGO) which set up a purification plant, there would be no source of clean drinking water,“ she said.
With black cotton soil covering majority of area, most farmers grow cotton during the Kharif season following the monsoons and during Rabi, usually switch to growing chillies. While most farmers said there usually is not a problem for kharif, the rabi season is dependent on rains during January and February.“There are a lot of problems for us,“ complained Sanjeeva Reddy, a young farmer. “Nearly 90 per cent of us depend on agriculture and despite making several requests to banks and politicians, no one has come forward to help us in getting loans from banks. We really have no option but to harvest any rain and store the water for agriculture,“ he said. Sandeep Reddy, another farmer, said that the government has not come forward to provide loans to allow them to raise horticulture crops or even provide input subsidies for such crops.
With no groundwater reserve in the village, the farmers resorted to digging small ponds as a community initiative. In most cases, a group of farmers, usually related to one another, join hands along with sharing the costs of the digging and lining the bottom with layers of crushed stone and sand. Once the pond is filled during the monsoon, as and when needed, the farmers take turns to irrigate their land so everyone in that group gets to share the water.
Incidentally, the neighbouring Kasimdevipeta, Ramaiahpally and Panchothkulapally villages are now following the Devagiripatnam model. 

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