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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Tears of joy: How onion farming is helping Madhya Pradesh's Korku Adivasis tide over drought -Rohit Jain

Tears of joy: How onion farming is helping Madhya Pradesh's Korku Adivasis tide over drought -Rohit Jain

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published Published on May 26, 2017   modified Modified on May 26, 2017
-Scroll.in

Growing the traditional maize and soya bean crops is no longer economically viable.

“The land is thirsty, the Korku is hungry,” goes the refrain of the Korku Adivasis in the Satpura forest in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district.

An unrelenting drought since 2014 has parched the Korku farmland, driving a population of over 40,000 spread across 100-odd villages to desperation. In Khari village, for example, more than half the farmers have been forced to migrate in search of livelihood.

Vishram Kajale, 33, has found work in a pulse-processing unit in Dhule, a town across the state border in Maharashtra. His three brothers have followed him out as well. “I have a well on my farm but it got filled up with mud,” he said, explaining why he had to leave. “I had cemented the walls but cracked developed in the concrete and it got filled up again.”

The water crisis in the Adivasi region is all too visible. In Khari, there is only one 50-foot deep well that still has some water in it. “We have to walk one kilometre to fetch water from that well,” said Saraswati Kajale, 30.

Nearly 5 kilometres away in Karwani village, Sushi Kumari mistook this reporter for a government official and asked if I was there to pay “compensation”. What for? “My field was submerged after the government built a pond near it,” she replied. The pond, built a few years ago to tide over the water scarcity, is fast running dry.

“Farmers are free men,” Vishram Kajale said, ruefully. “But the lack of water has killed us.”

All is not lost, though. While growing soybean and maize, the traditional crops of the Korku, is hardly economically viable, cultivating onion is. In 2016, a few farmers switched to onion farming at the persuasion of SocioFarm, a non-profit launched the previous year with the “sole objective to generate livelihood for these Adivasi farmers”.

A year on, several farms in Khari and Junapani villages are under onion cultivation. It is an indigenous variety of onion now branded as “Koro”, which means human in Korku language.

“This is a pilot initiative where farmers sow onion on less than an acre of land,” said SocioFarm founder Mohit Raj. “We bring them together into farmer groups for collective production, provide seeds and ensure efficient use of the available irrigation facilities.”

SocioFarm chose fields that still had a water source in the vicinity – a depleted well, a pond.

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Scroll.in, 24 May, 2017, https://scroll.in/magazine/837112/tears-of-joy-how-onion-farming-is-helping-madhya-pradeshs-korku-tribals-tide-over-drought


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