GUWAHATI, Oct 25 ? The State?s rich pastures are now available only in the anecdotal memoirs of the indigenous village folks. Gone are the days when the State farmers used to deliver with astounding capacity varieties of organic dairy products without depending on any help injected by the administration. With the traditional dairy farming many institutions and games like the Garakhiya Sabah were inseparably linked. These socio-cultural elements are also missing today. Credit goes to the imprudent vote-bank-based polity of the country for tricking out the abundance of the State?s indigenous dairy farms.
In 2003, the size of the bovine population in the State was around 1,11,50, 644. There was a shortfall of 23,115 MT of fodder for this bovine population, said a document prepared by the State Veterinary Department in 2003-04. But the efforts of the Veterinary Department to assess the present availability status of green fodder and to steer improvement in the area have been allegedly snubbed by State Government with silence, said knowledgeable circles here.
There has been a nagging pressure on the State Government since independence, to open the State?s grazing reserves and wasteland etc. for settlement of the migrants and refuges from the then East Pakistan/ East Bengal. There is also another pressure group active within the State. It has been working mainly for the settlement of the indigenous landless people on ?Government land?.
But the pressures from within the ruling Congress and the Central Government were for the settlement of the new settlers, who migrated to this part of the country following the British rule and partition of the country.
The State Revenue Department had resisted such pressures for a considerably long period. But finally, it had to yield to the pressures. Revenue records say that in 1946-47 the State Government employed one Mr Desai as a special officer to survey the available cultivable wasteland in the State. On June 22,1951, the Revenue Department finalised a memorandum on cultivable wasteland of the State.
It was signed by the then Under Secretary of the State?s Revenue Settlement Department U K Sarma. The memorandum is a mine of information on the then available wasteland, including the grazing reserves of the State.
The memorandum stated that the total areas then covered by the Village Grazing Reserves (VGRs) and Professional Grazing Reserves (PGRs) were 2,69,075 acres and 2,85,045 acres respectively. The memorandum stated further that it was estimated that about 47,00,000 heads of bovine in the State grazed outside the PGRs. As the total area of the VGRs in the State was only 2,69,075 acres, the memorandum worked out that only .18 bighas of grazing area was available for each of the cattle population then.
In support of its above assertion, it referred to the estimate made by Mr. Arbuthnot and informed that there also the State Government had to throw open some areas of those VGRs to ?provide land to the hungry population under the policy of Grow More Food?. The total VGR area thus thrown open temporarily for cultivation since 1949-50 was 5,719 acres, the memorandum stated.
The Muslim League Ministry in the State in 1943 also appointed a special officer to examine the issue of surplus land suitable for cultivation in the PGRs. Then it was estimated that the total area of the PGRs was 2,85,045 acres. The 1943 survey pointed out that the buffaloes and the cattle grazing in the reserves used to play a very important part in the life of the people.
They were the sources of supply of draught animals, supply of milk and milk produce to the neighbourhood and beyond and also the sources of supplementary income to a number of persons interested in the production and distribution of milk, milk produce and draught animals. Mr Desai quoted in his report some of the observations made by the Royal Commission on Agriculture in its chapter-VII, which dealt with animal husbandry.
The Royal Commission observed, among others: ?In no country of the world are cattle of more importance than they are in India. Without them no cultivation would be possible nor produce grown be transported.? Mr. Desai hence observed that the area available for grazing purposes in the PGRs was hardly sufficient for the heads of buffaloes and cows that had to be grazed in those grazing reserves. He, hence, did not consider it wise to de-reserve any area out of those reserves, said the 1951 memorandum.
In spite of Mr. Desai?s above observation, the State Government de-reserved an area of 31,278 acres of the PGRs to accommodate the landless and the flood-affected people, said the memorandum. The State Government through a resolution on land settlement on January 20,1968, decided to encourage fodder cultivation in the VGRs, ?with serious steps?. Moreover, the resolution called for formation of small committees in the gram sabha areas to keep watch against encroachment in the VGRs and the PGRs.
It also reiterated the Government resolve to evict all encroachers from the forest reserves and VGRs and PGRs. ?It will be the responsibility of the local officers to keep themselves alert and evict the encroachers before they establish themselves firmly in these reserves,? it said.
But since then, the developments are such that the State is now finding it hard to feed its over one crore bovine population. According to dairy experts, a State cannot make any headway in the dairy sector by keeping its bovine population starved. Perhaps this statement has left no scope for contradiction.