Organic Farming Initiatives in Dantewada: From Subsistence to Sustainability

Skirting the hazards of chemical farming by a whisker, the tribal farmers in Dantewada district, with the help of a strong and supportive District Collector, set an example to other villages by using traditional seeds cultivated the SRI way, to find that their produce, both in terms of quantity and quality, is comparable to any crop produced with newer techniques. Age-old wisdom prevailing over modern quick-fixes!

D antewada, situated in southern Chhattisgarh, is among the most backward and remote districts of India. Surrounded by hillocks covered with semi-tropical forest (60 per cent of the area of the district is covered by forests), it is the home of the tribal community of Madiya Gond (71 per cent of the population is tribal) and the population density of the district is merely 83 per sq km.

Like all other tribal communities, the Madiya Gonds of Dantewada are dependent on natural resources for a living, the most prominent sources being agriculture and forest produce. The forest provides them with wood, fodder and minor forest produce and acts as a source of food and medicine in the form of roots, tubers, fruits, wild vegetables and mushrooms. Agriculture, on the other hand, is mainly practised as a means of subsistence. A century back, these sources of livelihood were abundant and the population was very sparse. The tribal way of life—simple, free and in harmonious coexistence with nature—had little interference from the outside world. The description of such tribal life comes in the ethnographic writings of Haimendorf when he travelled through Bastar in the late 70s (Haimendorf 1982, p.202). He writes: