Uttarakhand Villages and the Human - Wildlife conflict - Challenges of farming in hilly terrain

Farming – though it is considered to be a noble profession is a daunting task for most farmers of our country. All of us are aware of the Vidharba and other backwards areas of our country; however not much is known about the difficulties that farmers of Uttarakhand have to come across on day to day basis. 

Farming on the hilly terrains is indeed a tedious task and yet little has been done to overcome the challenges faced by the farmers. This time team Tvam India decided to visit the Uttarkashi region and understand the difficulties faced by the farmers of this area and ultimately try to frame and implement some ideas to help them resolve some of their major problems which in the past has caused many to quit farming as a means of livelihood – ‘The Human Wildlife conflict’.

After a survey of the region it was found that there are numerous challenges faced by the farmers of Uttarakhand. Some of the major challenges are as follows -

1. Irrigation - Most of farmers depend solely on rainfall for irrigating their fields. Some of the irrigation canals which could have been created were not made due to objections from respective forest department. It is a strange paradox that in spite of receiving heavy rainfall many times the crops die due to the lack of proper irrigation.
2. Knowledge - Lack of proper knowledge is another problem which most of the farmers are not even aware of. For example most of them grow different variety of rice in the adjacent fields and as a result due to cross pollination the productivity in both the fields decreases. This is a common practice in the hills which in-facts back fires the overall productivity.
3. Connectivity - Most villages in Uttarakhand do not have access to motor able roads due to which they cannot sell their produce nor can they buy essential materials such as good quality seeds, pesticides, etc easily leading to delays in transportation and thus loss of productivity.
4. Wildlife conflict - After facing the many challenges of growing crops most of it gets destroyed by the wild animals such as wild boars, deer and bears etc. This is really frustrating for the hard working farmer community as the animals attack the crops when they are about to ripen and ready to be cut and sold in market. 

Out of above problems animal attacks on crops is one of the major problems of farming and not many concrete steps have been taken by the government or the forest officials to help villagers resolve this issue.

This time we had with us a young man - Mr. Prakash Mehta from Gujrat to help the villagers understand and resolve the problem of wild life conflict in the region. Prakash has a masters degree in Wild Life and is also associated with Wild life Institute of India, Dehradun. Prakash surveyed the region and thereafter organized a workshop with Tvam for the villagers of this region. 

Some of the main points that we covered in our workshop were -

1. The conflict happens because both human beings and the animals want food and since these animals have become fond of eating the crops for sometime now thus they encroach and attack the farmers fields. To give an analogy -0 ‘if you have an option to choose between a candy and a chocolate you would rather prefer chocolate over candy.’
2. The other reason for the attacks would be that these animals are not getting enough food inside the jungle thus they are forced to encroach the fields.
3. To resolve this conflict either the villagers can provide animals food within the jungle area or make a strong fencing near the border areas of the jungle. Prakash suggested the villagers to make small fields inside the jungle and then leave a gap of approximately 50 meters between their farms and jungle. In this 50 m gap they should not produce anything and this gap is known as buffer zone.
4. To not allow the cows of the villagers to graze in the jungle, instead the cows graze can be produced in the farm. 

Harshit from Tvam India on his way to survey the region

Prakash and Vinay on their way to jungle to conduct survey of the region

Harshit conducting workshop on being self employed through dairy farming

Prakash conducting workshop with villagers on Human - Wild life conflict

Harshit and Prakash with villagers after conducting workshop

It is still a long journey that we have to cover to help the people of the village resolve the conflict and other problems related to farming, however we have taken our first steps in this area and we hope that we along with the villagers of this region will go a long way together to support them and make them self sustained and more confident to build a better world for them and for all of us.