Organic move

After 10,000 farmers in Dantewada district secured Chhattisgarh's first organic certification, the entire district now gears up to transition fully to organic farming

- ROHINI KRISHNAMURTHY

CHANNU KUNJAM recalls the advice his father gave him when he took up farming 13 years ago: "Chemicals will ruin our land." The resident of Aalnar village in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district says his family has always practised organic farming, relying on dried leaves and cow dung. A decade ago, Kunjam, who owns 2.54 hectares (ha), started preparing jeevamrit, a fertiliser made using ingredients available at home and in the fields. "We need cow dung and urine, jaggery, gram flour and soil to make jeevamrit. We leave it for seven days before using it on the field," says Kunjam.

Rita Modiyam, a farmer from Masoodi village in the same district, says the use of jeevamrit has helped improve the productivity of her farm. "I was a subsistence farmer a decade ago. Today I grow enough crops to feed my family and sell at least 20 quintals (2,000 kg) of paddy and a variety of vegetables," says Modiyam.

Kunjam and Modiyam are among the over 10,000 farmers in 110 villages of Dantewada who have received organic certification under the Large Area Certification (LAC) scheme in 2023-24. Launched in 2020-21, LAC is a Union government initiative to certify large contiguous areas such as hills, islands, or desert belts that have been traditionally organic. It is part of the Participatory Guarantee System-India, an organic certification framework introduced in 2011. Until now, only Ladakh (5,000 ha) and Lakshadweep (2,700 ha) had received LAC certification. With the 110 villages, which have 65,000 ha of farm area, Chhattisgarh has become the first state to have area certified under LAC.

COMBINED EFFORT