In Lhuentse, the land management project which initially began as an initiative to make farming easy and less laborious is gradually turning into a measure to address the issue of gungtong or empty houses. It is expected to retain people in the villages. Currently, the district has more than 300 gungtongs and around 2,000 acres of fallow farmland due to steep landscape and scanty workforce.
This is Maenbi Gewog in Lhuentse where land management project is currently underway. According to the gewog representative, it was carried out following requests from the villagers.
The elderly people in the village say such a project is crucial as more farm lands are turning barren with people migrating to towns over the years.
The gewog has over 1700 acres of barren farm land and more than 40 empty households.
Maenbi Tshogpa Karmala said, “Most of the lands here are left fallow. It is mainly because we do not have the human resource to work on these lands. The children have left for towns like Thimphu and the elderly people cannot do more work.”
Maenbi Gup Ngawang Dhendrup said, “The area of land left barren is increasing every year. We have started reclaiming them through the use of excavators and making them convenient for cultivation. This way we can reduce dependency on human resources by 90 per cent and can rely on machines.”
Although there is no record yet of people returning to village following the project, the gewogs are seeing an increasing number of villagers resuming farming on the land which were left fallow before the implementation of the project.
“The terraces were very small. We couldn’t cultivate paddy properly. Now, the government has widened the terraces and made it convenient for us to work. We are thankful for it,” said Kezang Dema, a resident of Maenbi Gewog.
“My land was very steep and uncultivable in the past. However, this year the land development project has made it very convenient. I am very excited and have plans to cultivate crops now,” said Sonam Lhamo, a resident of Maenbi Gewog.
Farmers in some gewogs where the project has been completed say that the quantity of their farm production has improved.
Namgay Dema, Lhuentse
Edited by Phub Gyem
