Sipringa: A Decade of Growth and Prosperity

Encouraging farmers to use the SRI method of cultivation, focussing on land and water development, the members of the SHGs bring about socio-economic changes that enable a once-poverty stricken people to become self-sufficient and secure

S ipringa is a remote village situated 22 km away from the district headquarters of Gumla in Jharkhand. Connectivity to the village is very limited. The village comprises about 60 families belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Castes (OBCs). The people of the village are mostly farmers and jungle dwellers and only a few of them work as blacksmiths, carpenters and shopkeepers in the local haats (small weekly markets).

The landscape of the village is undulating and can be categorized as lowlands, medium lowland, upland, homesteads and fallows in the foothills for grazing. On an average, one family has 0.75 to one acre of medium lowland, one acre of upland and about 0.1 acre of homestead.

The Socio-Economic Scenario of Sipringa Before PRADAN Intervened

To understand the past situation of Sipringa, we asked the villagers to share what they remembered of the earlier Sipringa. Families struggled to get two meals a day. Shivnath da, an aged farmer of the village, told us that families with children were forced to send one or two of their children to landlords, who employed them as household workers or farm labour and, in return, the family would get 500–1,000 kg of paddy at the end of the year. This contract labour system is locally known as dhangad rakhna. The farmers were dependent on the landlords (ganju) for cash and food, but because the interest rates at which they borrowed money were very high, the families invariably fell into a debt trap with these landlords. Selling firewood (those who had a bicycle) was one way of earning cash and food. The villagers also resorted to distress migration. At least one person from a family would migrate for work after the kharif paddy transplantation. Some families even told stories about how they ate some tubers from the forest for breakfast and lunch, in the absence of their staple food—paddy.The farmers were growing 16 crops simultaneously to make ends meet. Of those crops, paddy, millets, pulses and oilseeds were grown by all. These crops, however, were rain-fed and low productivity was very low.