Matching farming methods to climate
RICE IS the staple crop of deltaic Orissa and around 1990 occupied about 87 per cent of the total cultivated area. Four types of paddy were grow, according to season.
Biali was sown in April or May and reaped by the end August or early September. Saradh dhan was cultivated on lowlands, sown in May or June and harvested between October and January. Dalua was cultivated on the lowland along river banks or in marshy lands, sown in January and harvested between March and May.
These varieties were grown across three cropping seasons, which constituted the agrarian cycle of the delta. Water waschiefly needed thrice a year, in May-June for ploughing, in July-August for bhiushan or ploughing up the young rice plants, and in October for the final ripening of crop.
The cultivators used as manure the silt brought in the flood water.The need to secure the traditional supply of muddy flood waters provoked resistance to the embankment policies of the last 1850s. The colonial policy of hermetically sealing the embankments led to a series of attacks on them. These attacks were well organised and embankments were breached at many places.
Embankments existed in Orissa much before the British conquest.W W Hunter, a British administrator and gazetteer, described them as "great mounds of earth" constructed along the banks of the deltaic rivers. According to him, these were built and maintained by villages through community labour. Each village looked after the section of the river's embankment that passed through its boundaries. Breaches were made to let in the flood waters and repaired subsequently.
The British rule changed all this, altering the very nature of the village community. It reworked property relations. The failure of the British canal and embankment system, called the Orissa Scheme, led some officials to change their perceptions.
As early as 1869, F H Rundall, a British irrigation expert, observed, "We started with the idea that it was only necessary to show an Oriya water and he would run at it straight away. We find it not so. The Oriya thinks long before he commits himself. His system of cultivation has been adapted to an uncertain and precarious rainfall and periodic inundation. He has one field on the high ground, another in the hollow and another half-way in between, so that if he loses one crop by either flood or drought he is pretty too sure to save the other."