The ‘Ground Truth’: Understanding Land Degradation in Raichur
CSEI is starting to work with grassroots partners in Raichur to map the problems and possible solutions around agricultural land degradation.
The north-eastern district of Raichur, along with Koppal and Bellary, make up the ‘Rice Bowl of Karnataka’. One would assume the land sandwiched between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers would be fertile and bountiful. But as we drove through the district, the croplands we saw on both sides of the road painted an entirely different picture — we saw top-soil eroded dry agricultural lands, acres of salty desertscapes and wells without water.
We were on a three-day visit to different talukas in Raichur district facilitated by a coalition of NGOs including Prarambha and the Foundation for Ecological Security, who are working together to address the issue of land degradation in private and common lands. This visit was a preliminary exploratory visit under CSEI’s Farms and Forests Initiative to understand the landscape, identify the stakeholders working in the region and to get a sense of the problems faced by the rainfed farmers due to agricultural land degradation.
The causes and nature of land degradation varies
We visited only four villages during this first round of fieldwork in the last week of May and each place had a completely different story to tell, indicating how complex and varied the process of land degradation is. It does not merely result from the non-availability of water; there are multiple natural and human-induced factors at play that need to be carefully understood if we are to identify viable ways forward.
In the Bommanagunda village of Devadurga taluk alone, there are around 325 borewells; but no sign of water. Drinking water tankers ply here all through the summers to meet basic necessities; so water availability for agriculture is out of question.
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But Huvinabhavi village in the newly carved out Muski taluka has a different story to tell. Here, water is available through borewells but it is, conversely, the source of problems for villagers here. NGO staff here say that the groundwater is contaminated and as a result, agricultural yield has reduced to around 25% of what was harvested previously. Arsenic and fluoride were listed as pollutants but we are yet to verify this ourselves.
We are also yet to ascertain the exact extent of degradation in the region. But a field coordinator of Prarambha, an NGO working in the region for the restoration of agricultural lands, claimed that there are approximately more than 2,000 acres of unproductive, abandoned agricultural land in Muski taluka alone, attributed to various reasons including soil salinity.
It is not as though areas with access to canal irrigation for decades are better off. Even though our focus is on rainfed farmers, the NGO staff we met told us about the nature of land degradation experienced in irrigated areas. Farmers have shifted to water-intensive crops like paddy from traditional dry crops like groundnut and pearl millet when they got access to canal irrigation. But they started applying chemical fertilisers and pesticides uncontrollably, affecting the productivity of the land over the years.
The farmers are now resuming cultivation of dry crops even in irrigated areas. Kuttappa and Mayyamma (names changed) are a farmer couple who diversified their livelihood from paddy farming to options like agroforestry, dry crops like groundnut, poultry and livestock since their paddy yields were diminishing every year.
Large parts of India’s total area is degraded
Around 30% of India’s total geographical area (TGA) is degraded, i.e. 96.40 million hectares (mha), according to the land degradation and desertification atlas published by the Space Applications Centre (SAC) at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Their analysis shows that around 23.95% (2011–13) of ‘desertification/land degradation’ with respect to total TGA is contributed by Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. All other states contribute less than 1% (each) to ‘desertification/land degradation’.
It is important for us to add a caveat here that desertification and land degradation are not synonymous, though it appears so in official documentation. Deserts are naturally occurring ecosystems with rich endemic species and the Indian classification of degradation wrongly classifies deserts as degraded lands.
The following diagram and table from the atlas sums up the extent and nature of land degradation in Karnataka state.
As mentioned above, a variety of factors can lead to the degradation of agricultural lands including water erosion, wind erosion, salinity/alkalinity etc. The NBSS-LUP’s findings (National Bureau of Soil Survey & Land Use Planning) on statewise factors affecting soil erosion also indicates the same for Karnataka.
Based on geospatial analyses and studies by state agencies, water erosion and salinity emerge as the major processes of degradation in Raichur district. But it’s counterintuitive to jump to conclusions and plan solutions based on such data alone. Even our brief time on the ground revealed that the drivers and types of land degradation hugely varied from one village to another within the district of Raichur alone.
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Though advances in open-access geospatial software holds promise, such as the recently-launched Dynamic World, there is a limit to how accurately such measurements match with the reality on the ground. Especially in regions undergoing rapid degradation, adversely affecting farming communities who depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, GIS data needs to be validated with thorough fieldwork and conversations with farmers and NGOs who live and work here.
Moreover, salinity levels and its impact on soils need to be better understood to tailor the right interventions, and to support farmers to transition from a state of degradation to a state of restoration.
That is why CSEI is starting to work with grassroots partners in Raichur to map the problems and possible solutions around agricultural land degradation from a farmer perspective. It is critical to support farmers like Kuttappa and Mayyamma who are holding on to their land and are trying their best to adapt to land degradation trends, while many others like them are forced to migrate to cities in search of work.
The blog post is based on a three-day field visit to Raichur by Karishma Shelar, Manjunath G. and Syamkrishnan P Aryan from the Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation at ATREE in the last week of May.
We are grateful to Prarambha for facilitating the field visit.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
