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“In the hands of the Community”
FOREWORD
A quiet revolution is happening in the rural landscape of Andhra Pradesh, led bypoor women, to change the face of farming in thousands of villages. This revolution,of farmers taking charge of their farming, of farmers stepping off treadmilltechnologies which ultimately increase the financial burden and deplete theirresources and of farmers saying that they are able to come out of the agrarian distressprevalent all over India, is through a state-supported programme called CommunityManaged Sustainable Agriculture [CMSA], implemented through women’s self helpmovement in Andhra Pradesh. The Rural Development department, through theIndira Kranthi Patham is investing its resources and energies in making farmersself-reliant in farming in terms of knowledge as well as resources.Dubbed by the media as the world’s largest ecological farming project supported bythe state, this programme is making a sea change in the lives of farmers wherever itis being implemented to the extent that youth in the villages are returning to farmingand farmers are seeing agriculture as a dignified and viable profession again. Farmersare reporting that their net incomes are going up and that they are able to step outof the debt trap.With committed and well meaning bureaucrats at the helm initiating this effort in2004, this programme is being driven by the enthusiasm, skills and capabilities of women’s groups in eighteen districts of Andhra Pradesh.This small booklet tries to capture the changes that are happening in various villageswhich are part of the programme. These changes, which challenge establishedmindsets about farming and notions of development in general, are evident inindividuals [farmers, scientists, technocrats, bureaucrats, political leaders and others]as well as in whole communities. In a remarkably brief time, this programme wasable to create around fifty pesticides-free villages and seven organic villages indifferent districts and has plans to expand as well as intensify work on variousother fronts like marketing.This documentation of the CMSA programme focuses on villages which havechanged
in toto
and finds that a variety of factors have contributed to the successes– committed and well-equipped frontline workers as well as farmer-activists are amajor reason for such change; women voting with their feet and going out of theirway to implement this programme has contributed to the success in several places;existing advantages with some villages, like homogeneity in a community, one villageelder that everyone listens to, or everyone in a village being unified in their objectivesetc., have also helped. Further, the rapport and commitment of the local NonGovernmental Organisation with the village community meant easier transition inseveral cases. The institutional systems built in the programme, including the presenceof an extension worker in the form of the Village Activist right in the village and theregular conduct of farmer field schools have given tremendous strength to theprogramme. Capacity building efforts at all levels have given the right kind of
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