Section - X - The Next Steps - Moving Towards a Collective

The Next Steps:

1. A quick Hydological assessment has to be done for the area using the secondary data like satellite mapping, rainfall patterns etc., This is necessary for the irrigation potential assessment

2. Microplanning: Microplanning involves survey of the local neighbourhood for identification of the various resources, good and bad practices, wastages and utilisations of the natural resources. A Survey has to be done in the NU to make up some 3-4 modules of the LEISA intervention (The attached document Datye’s Document_17082006.doc explains the area and water calculations). This survey would be the Microplanning activity to collect the follwing data

a) Water Use
b) Land Use
c) Entitlement
d) Pricing
e) Finance

But anybody working in community development would know that the most abused instrument in a community is the SURVEY!! So to make the Survey as a starting point of the intervention would serve no purpose with no meaningful data collected as the community would have the fatigue of ONE MORE SURVEY. So the idea is to start Microplanning activity after the first year when we have shown the spectacular result in the 1/2 acre. Then the survey could be related to the activity that has already happened and the hope is that the data hence collected would be much more genuine

3. Evolving a Collective: From this data the other farmers in the neighbourhood would be interested to convert to organic as they would have seen that the only input that we would have given for the 1/2 acre was Labour and that too this labour has come as an EGA!! This is not theory but actually this is what happened in our Magadi Intervention. There were 21 farmers at the end of one season wanting to do this in their farms!! So the idea is to form a collective of not the complete Gram Sabha but, manageable units, what are called as Neighbourhood Units (NU), which is typically 40 – 50 Households (HH) and for tribal areas 100 HH. This unit would be a combination of resource poor, landless and land holding farmers

4. The Emergence of the Group of 20 women from 5 women: The increase in the area of cultivation would need more people to work [details provided in later sections] with each set of women concentrating on specific activities like some women working on the preparation of the soil, land development etc., others producing vermicompost,some women managing the procurement and distribution of the produce, sedd banks etc.,

5. We are considering a total area of 10 Ha (25 Acres) [ The detailed calculations are provided in the next section ] in which we are telling the chemical farmers that for them to move away from the Chemical Farming they can utilise the services of these women whose labour is coming from the EGA ( or NREGA as the case maybe) and this is the only sort of support that needs to be offered for a period of 2-3 years and the farmers can be moved away from the fertilisers and pesticide input costs and subsidy.