It is a land that, literally, turns dreams into dust. Huge tracts of land in the underbelly of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state, have failed to sustain those dependent on it. These are the sodic lands of UP’s hinterland, soils with such high alkalinity that villagers routinely use it for soap. Its dry top soil, as fine and flyaway as talcum powder, hosts no plants and the underlying compacted layer allows no trees to take root. Generations of farmers in these areas have tried coaxing a living from these lands but they remained adamantly barren.

Today, however, there are heartening splashes of green in this ashen landscape. These are the patches of sodic lands reclaimed under the World Bank-assisted UP Sodic Lands Reclamation (II) Project. For the first time in decades, there is wheat and paddy swaying in the fields and, for the first time, too, grain bins in the villages are full.

“Our lands wouldn’t even give us fodder, let alone grain for our children,” says Pavitra Devi of Dhandwa village in eastern UP’s Jaunpur district. “But, today, we have such flourishing crops of wheat and paddy that we have to chase away the nilgais (wild blue bulls) from our fields.”

Buddhram Maurya of Purwaha village nearby, who has seen his two bighas – a bigha is one fourth of a hectare – of sodic land go from barren to productive, says, “Earlier a seed wouldn’t take root in these lands; now I run a profitable seed shop to meet the local demand for newer and better quality seeds.”

Farmers preparing their lands for the reclamation process

Way across the state in Hathras district, Sundar Singh of Bilar village, whose 5.5 bighas gave him around 2,000 kg of rice and 1,500 kg of wheat last season and is now partly planted with sugarcane, looks at his resurrected land with pride: “This land was worth Rs 500 per bigha earlier; now I won’t give it up even if someone offers me Rs 4,000 per bigha.”

All across the interior of UP, acre after hectare of barren sodic land are being reclaimed by this farmer-driven program propelled by the state-run UP Bhumi Sudhar Nigam Ltd (UPBSN). The current US$ 194 million Bank-assisted Project is building on the successes of an earlier project that ran between 1993 and 2001.

Sodic lands are those lands with a high content of salts like sodium carbonate and bicarbonate. In areas with a high water table or where drainage is inadequate, the alkali salts in the earth’s crust get dissolved. These salts then rise through capillary action to the surface, where the water evaporates, leaving behind a salt crust that makes the land unsuitable for crop cultivation

Plagued by sodicity

Proper drainage of irrigation water is critical for preventing newly reclaimed lands from lapsing into sodicity again.

When the Project started in 1998, some 1.2 million hectares of land in Uttar Pradesh, comprising almost 10 percent of the state’s total cultivable area, was too degraded to farm. As a result, the production of major foodgrains rice and wheat suffered, with average annual growth rates in yields standing at 1 percent for rice and 1.6 percent for wheat.

Although UP lies across the highly-fertile Gangetic plain and has ample supplies of surface and groundwater, this apparently favorable position is also proving its undoing. The peculiarities of UP’s climate (heavy monsoon followed by prolonged dry spell) and an ailing irrigation and drainage system has led to a high build-up of soil salts in large parts of the state.

It is not as if these sodic lands are beyond reclamation or that the technical know-how to do so is missing. But, given the socio-political reality of land reform in India, sodic lands have mostly fallen to the lot of people too poor to afford the inputs needed for reclamation.

According to the baseline survey, some two-thirds (68 percent) of the people targeted by the Project lived below the poverty line, and one-third belonged to marginalized scheduled castes. The average size of land holdings in the Project area was 0.4 hectare — an economically viable land holding is considered to be about 1-1.5 hectares.

The Project’s greatest achievement then lay in blunting the edge of poverty in some of these chronically-impoverished areas. It helped raise the standard of living for hundreds of thousands of poor families. As their incomes from their lands improved, farm families began investing in household assets, in livestock and in improved farming tools and implements.

The Project has already helped improve the well-being of more than 330,000 poor families in 3,591 villages of 17 districts. Its other achievements include:

• More than 175,000 hectares of unproductive land has been reclaimed for agriculture, of which over 110,000 hectares is being cultivated for the first time
• Annual farm income has increased by over 150 percent, going up from an average of Rs 6,990 to Rs 17,916
• Annual per capita income has gone up from Rs 3,131 to Rs 4,792
• Annual household income has gone up by more than 50 percent from Rs 22,160 to Rs 33,908
• Cropping intensity in Project areas has risen from 49 percent to over 200 percent
• Wages for laborers have gone up from an average of Rs 42 to Rs 50
• The Project has helped increase local employment fivefold, resulting in a 10 percent drop in migration in Project areas
• Land prices have increased more than three times

The Project has helped set up 240 small marketpoints called sodic haats and has helped link 575 sodic villages to the formal agriculture marketing system.

Land for the landless

Farmers monitored the progress of land reclamation through innovative measures like village landscape maps drawn in mud

One of the project’s most effective and enduring interventions was in land tenure. Although many landless laborers and poor marginal farmers received land during India’s land reforms in the 1970s, this remained, for the most part, a nominal transfer. More often than not, the farmers possessed only a piece of paper, with land on the ground neither demarcated nor handed over to the recipients.

The Project worked with the local land records’ departments to secure unfettered title for farmers whose rights over their lands had not been formalized for decades. Moreover, some communal sodic land, belonging to gram sabhas, was handed over to landless families. More than 50,000 hectares of land was thus handed over to landless, small and marginal farmers.

Once the farmers had clear possession of their lands, the Project helped them organize themselves into small water-user groups of 10 to 15 farmers. Each group, centred on a tubewell that irrigated four hectares of land, acted as a reclamation team for a geographically juxtaposed area.

Local NGOs helped train these farmers in testing soil quality, and in preparing their fields for reclamation. They scraped the top soil, leveled the fields and built contour bunds; they installed tubewells where none existed, dug drainage channels and then linked them to the existing main drains.

The reclamation itself was a simple process that the farmers soon mastered – gypsum was mixed with the soil and the fields kept flooded for 15 days. When the water was drained, it washed away the harmful leached salts. This left the land ready to be transplanted with its first crop of kharif (summer) paddy. Then followed a winter
crop of wheat, and an intermediate crop of dhaincha, a nitrogen-fixing green manure needed to replenish the soil before a second paddy crop can be planted. Two or three cycles of these crops, along with efficient drainage, leaves the once-barren sodic soils ready to yield any crop, from oilseeds to vegetables to flowers.

Women’s Self-help groups

The Project also helped thousands of women add to family incomes by training them in livelihood activities and by linking them to the larger microcredit system

And while the men reap abundant harvests, the women of the area are sowing the seeds of their own revolution. The Project helped village women across the state form more than 7,500 self-help groups.

The SHGs started out as small thrift societies where women pooled household savings of sometimes as little as Rs 5 per month and borrowed from the kitty as need arose. The UPBSN staff helped train the women in a range of skills that could add to the household kitty. Some learnt tailoring, some learnt to make pickles and relishes, others learnt to weave baskets.

When an SHG’s corpus grew respectable enough, the Project mediated with commercial and cooperatives banks and helped connect it to the formal banking network. This allowed the women to take loans for setting up little micro-enterprises – they took loans for sewing machines, for grocery and vegetable shops, for a pair of goats or buffaloes etc. In Aligarh and Hathras districts, countless women’s SHGs are involved in making little glass beads that go to fuel north India’s burgeoning costume jewellery export business.

Even more striking is the change in the women themselves – they are more assured and more assertive. Today, impelled by their collective strength, women in countless little UP villages have taken charge of their lives in a hundred different ways. They have orchestrated regular visits by medical workers, they have set up Grain Banks and have even initiated their own literacy program, slapping a Rs 20-fine on any member who put a thumbprint on the SHG records.

“When women feel liberated, it liberates the whole community, and you can literally see the change in these villages,” says the Bank’s task leader for the Project, Paul Singh Sidhu. Take Dhandwa in district Jaunpur, he says. Here the change is most visible in the cleanliness of the village and in the villagers’ knowledge about health and hygiene, and on the premium they place on education.

Women’s Self Help Groups

• Total number – 7,517
• Total members – 86,980
• Total savings – Rs 74.4 million
• Cash credit extended by Banks –
  Rs 58 million
• Inter-loaning amount – Rs 121.6 million

Catalyzing social development

In fact, the actual success of the UP Sodic Project lies in its having catalyzed a deeper change in several impoverished communities across the state, for it has spurred whole communities to aspire and attain more. As their incomes improve, these villagers have begun registering demands for better education, better healthcare and better sanitation. “It is like a continuum of development that the Project has helped spark,” says Sidhu.

Impact on institutions

The Project also helped the implementing agency, the Uttar Pradesh Bhumi Sudhar Nigam, improve its capacity to handle not just land reclamation activities but complex allied issues of participatory management, women’s empowerment, human resource development and technology dissemination. Over the decade spanning the two phases of the UP Sodic program, UPBSN has been transformed into a mature support organization.