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Bumper harvest in parched land by Santosh K Kiro


For a village of 400, a lesson learnt in 1965 and acted upon 20 years later has meant that its residents don’t have to worry about Jharkhand’s recurring calamity: drought.

For those living in the Gumla village surrounded by hills, parched farmlands are a thing of the past, thanks to the success of a community initiative that led to the construction of a check dam to trap the water of a stream and store it in a reservoir below for irrigation.

“Like any other year, we are sure of bumper yields this year too,” said Mahipal Bhagat, a farmer of Sato-Nawatoli, 165km from Ranchi under Naxalite-hit Bishunpur block of Gumla.

For Sato-Nawatoli’s 70-odd households, two years of back-to-back droughts have not been able to dent their annual earnings. If the rest of the state reported poor paddy transplantation this year, the fields here have recorded 100 per cent plantation with crops looking green and healthy.

It all began with the Late Rati Bhagat, Mahipal’s uncle, who had an idea that was implemented with the help of a young lad from Gorakhpur who had come to Sato-Nawatoli wide-eyed, bristling with enthusiasm after joining the JP movement of the ’70s.

“After the 1965-66 famine that claimed about a dozen from our village, we started looking for a permanent solution to avert food scarcity,” recalled Dhirja Bhagat, the eldest among the village’s elders.

“I remember how, led by my cousin Rati Bhagat, we all went up to the hills surrounding our village to search for streams whose water we could somehow use for irrigating our farmland.”

They identified the Ghaghri stream on Sato Hill at about 1,200 feet and realised if they could manage to bring down the water to their fields spanning 400 acres, their lives would change.

Around that time in 1983, Ashok Bhagat from Gorakhpur landed in the village to pursue social work. It took him no time to realise that the check dam was what the village needed most.

“Bhagat was the one who arranged for cement and other materials to construct the check dam on the hill top,” Dhirja recalled.

It took them three years more to start work, most of the time spent in trying to convince government engineers of their idea.

They failed.

Some villagers still remember how after being turned back by the government engineers, they come out with spades and shovels to start giving shape to their dream.

By 1988, the dam was built. This meant that water from the stream would collect in a reservoir they built near the foothills. And the villagers would physically carry that water in containers to use in their fields.

This went on till 2007 when they gathered fresh resources and constructed cement channels to direct the water to their farmland.

“Other villages and governments can replicate the success story of Sato-Nawatoli village,” said Ashok Bhagat who now runs his own NGO, Vikas Bharti, in Bishunpur block headquarters. “This seems to be the only solution to tackle bad monsoons.”

Sato-Nawatoli is surrounded by three other hills, Bhowra, Bara and Bimarla, all within the Netarhat range in Gumla-Latehar districts of Jharkhand and parts of Chhattisgarh.

Though the village has only one primary school, most of the residents have studied up to class X. Their principal occupation, however, is farming, the check dam making their efforts sustainable.

Until two years back, the village was almost inaccessible after which it was connected to Bishunpur block headquarters by a road built under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana.

While villages around the district have reported an exodus of labourers due to two consecutive years of drought, farmers here celebrated by holding dhan jatra, or paddy mela, on Makar Sankranti on January 14, like they do every year.

“On this day, we reward farmers of other villages who take part in the mela and also treat them to a meal. This year, too, we will follow the custom,” Dhirja added.