After almost two decades, paddy cultivation has returned to Menchhari village under Orong Gewog in Samdrup Jongkhar. A group of youths in the village decided to cultivate paddy this year to promote agriculture and achieve self-sufficiency.
More than an acre of land in Menchhari village which was kept fallow till now has been made ready for paddy plantation. This was done successfully by a group of 13 youths from the village who did not want their ancestral lands to be kept fallow.
Villagers of Menchhari had given up paddy cultivation around 18 years ago mainly due to the shortage of workers and after their irrigation channel was damaged.
Since then, around ten acres of fields belonging to more than 20 households in the village remains fallow.
“We are doing this to be self-sufficient in future, our parents had stopped cultivating. We are trying to cultivate rice for self-consumption,” Sangay Dorji, one of the youth from the group, said.
“We are doing this to promote the paddy cultivation culture which our parents used to do before and to be self-sufficient without depending on others,” Yenten, another youth, said.
For almost 10 days, the group repaired the old irrigation channel which had been damaged by a landslide and remained unrepaired.
The youths are also applying the System of Rice Intensification method which they were trained on recently by the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative where production is more from less land and less water is required.
The group now plans to cultivate rice in more acres of land from next year.
