Hyderabad/Guwahati, 18th June 2019: The National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj – North Eastern Regional Centre (NIRDPR-NERC), located in Guwahati, led a thematic Working Group on ‘Shifting Cultivation: Towards a Transformation Approach’ and submitted report in the year 2018 to NITI Aayog which has been accepted for implementation.
The Working Group was led by NIRDPR-NERC with Director, Dr. RM Pant as the Coordinator. The North Eastern Region Community Resource Management Project (NERCORMP), Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (MDONER), Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) were other Institutional members. The North Eastern Regional Centre (NERC) of NIRDPR is located in in Guwahati to orient its training and research activities to the needs, problems and potentials of North Eastern Region.
The Working Group has submitted a Report that has been accepted by the Government of India for implementation. As a follow-up to the report of NITI Aayog, a three-day International Symposium on ‘Transitioning Shifting Cultivation to Climate Resilient Farming Systems’ was held in Guwahati between 12th and 14th June 2019 in partnership with ICIMOD and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
The symposium was attended by experts from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. The inaugural session was chaired by Dr. V. K. Saraswat, Member, NITI Aayog, with many luminaries taking part including Dr. Siddhanta Das, DG MoEFCC, Dr. W. R. Reddy, DG NIRDPR, Dr. Eklavya Sharma, DDG ICIMOD, Dr. Dhrupad Chaudhury, Senior Adviser ICIMOD, and Ms. Rasha Yousuf Omaron, Country Director, IFAD, among others.
At the event, Dr. VK Saraswat, Member NITI Aayog, emphasized the need to use innovative ideas and appropriate technologies to make ‘Shifting cultivation’ sustainable.
The thematic Working Group on ‘Shifting Cultivation: Towards a Transformation Approach’ and suggested five action points:
* Consolidate the learning on magnitude of the problem
* Identify viable best practices with potential for upscaling
* Assess institutions (formal and traditional) and need for transformation
* Ascertain to what extent and which ‘co-benefits’ could be delivered (to jhumias and State agencies)
* Suggest an action agenda (short-, medium-, and long- term)
Addressing the audience, Dr. WR Reddy, IAS, Director General, NIRDPR, stressed the need to quantify the extent of shifting cultivation in the North East region, highlighting the initiatives of NERC in mapping the shifting cultivation-affected areas in the region using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies.
There were four technical sessions in the symposium. Each session had thematic presentation and country wise group work. The group work was consolidated to prepare final recommendations for developing appropriate policies to enable transitioning Shifting cultivation climate resilient farming systems.
The symposium commenced with a one-day field trip to ‘Karbi Anglong’ followed by two days of deliberations structured around four identified areas of concern for shifting cultivators and policymakers working on transformations. Gender and governance were the cross-cutting issues for each of these areas:
* Changing land use and tenurial security
* Challenges to wider ecosystem services from agricultural transformation
* Food and nutritional security
*Access to appropriate technology, credit programmes and schemes for effective transformations
Shifting cultivation, locally known as ‘Jhum’ continues to be a dominant mode of food production and the economic mainstay of many rural households in the hilly regions including those of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. For successive governments, both at the Centre and in the States, the management of shifting cultivation has been – and still remains – a fundamental imperative for agricultural development planning in the uplands of northeast India.
Most development planners and policymakers perceive the practice of shifting cultivation as subsistence, economically unviable and environmentally destructive, and hence a major hurdle to agricultural development in States where shifting cultivation is practiced. Governments therefore have consistently tried to replace the practice with settled agriculture, allocating substantial financial outlays to support agricultural transformation. However, dietary diversity and nutritional security for the people living in ‘Jhum’ Areas are some concerns that will have to be addressed to tackle ‘Jhum Cultivation’ being practiced in unsustainable manner.
