| |
WHOSE GRASS IS IT ANYWAY?
Maharashtra Herald, Pune
There is nothing official about it. Yet, the ban on grazing imposed in certain villages of Ahmednagar has led to remarkable results. Huned Contractor reports.
During a late evening hour, the people of Nandanvan village in Ahmednagar gather for a spot of entertainment. But there is no music or dance. Instead, it’s an enactment – a kind of street theatre – by selected people whose primary objective is to imprint on everyone’s mind that random grazing by cattle, goat and sheep can hamper the progress of the village. The children, especially, roar with laughter as one of the ‘actors’ adopts an aggressive stance to defy the orders issued by the Gram Panchayat. “Your cattle have been found grazing on forbidden territory,” accuses the village head. “So?” asks the owner. “You are not allowed to take your cattle there,” he is told. “Says who?” he retorts. “We are using the land for watershed development at a cost of Rs 50 lakhs. We cannot allow any grazing activity to interfere with this project,” a Panchayat member states. “Then show me where I can take my cattle for grazing,” the owner points out. The argument continues for quite a while. Everyone present there finds it funny. But at the end of it, the message is driven home with absolute clarity – that unchecked grazing destroys the land.
In villages like Malshendre and Nandanvan, among many others, the ban on grazing has no official stamp. Instead, it has been a collective decision taken by the villagers themselves to ensure that the watershed development projects initiated by Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR) yield the expected benefits. “Our villages lie in a rain-shadow zone so that droughts had become a regular feature. The land had become dry and not fit for any cultivation. That is when WOTR stepped in and convinced us to build check dams and bunds so as to properly conserve whatever rain we get every year. Over a period of a decade, the land has turned fertile and most villages have an abundant crop of onions, tomatoes, pomegranates and sweet lime every year. We also have enough grass for use as fodder. Here, the issue of preventing grazing by animals came up because plantations in the watershed development territories helped check the flow and subsequent waste of water as also put a halt to soil erosion. When we realised how harmful grazing can be, we decided to ban it,” explains Balaji Hambad, a member of the Village Watershed Committee (VWC).
But this was no fairy tale. The resistance to the ban was so strong that there were incidents that threatened to spark off violent reactions. “We once found some shepherds grazing on land marked off for watershed programmes and when we tried to stop them, they attacked us with stones and even pulled out knives. But we stood our ground and confiscated their cattle. They finally realised their folly and agreed to pay the fine,” narrates Shriram Bhaganagare, a farmer. It was the decision to levy a fine of Rs 20 per cattle head that finally put some fear into the hearts of the rebels. “The problem was that the landless people whose livelihood was dependent on cattle and sheep felt that they were being deprived of their rights because watershed would anyway benefit only the farmers. We had to then explain to them that a watershed project was just a starting point for many other projects such as setting up self help groups for women, giving out loans for entrepreneurship and so on. It hasn’t been an easy process and even today we occasionally find animal owners sneaking into these areas for grazing on the sly. We have to therefore keep a constant vigil and to encourage total participation, half the amount of the fine is given to the person who apprehends any offender,” explains Ganpat Gaikwad, a VWC member.
The good thing is that even women have become a part of this movement. “When it was first proposed that no one should trespass into the land ear-marked for watershed development, we said to ourselves that it was the business of men to see that the rules were adhered to. But gradually, we started helping out too and now groups of women also volunteer to keep a watch. This has helped bring us together and we now have several self help groups to fund small business enterprises. The idea is that we are doing all this for our future generation,” Surajtai Mortade states. As to whether the forest department or the police have any role to play, Gaikwad points out that “it’s useless to depend on any government agency to prevent random grazing.” The reason given is that forest officers are hardly interested in any development activities while the police are only good at grabbing such opportunities to milk money out of the hapless villagers. To go back to the demand of the herding community for grazing zones, the villagers have offered them their own farms to serve the purpose. “Now, of course, the grass has grown and the herders are free to come and cut it as and how they want it,” Gaikwad says. Success has come at last, rough though the ride has been.
TOP |
|
