A Successful Paradigm

Ten youths of Vidyapatinagar block in Samastipur district have achieved success in fish farming and they don’t have any plan to showcase their success before farmers. Manoj Kumar and his friends have land in Dumardah chaur in Vidyapatipatinagar block. That land along with the land of entire chaur was unused before 2012-13 due to water logging. A canal was built through MNREGA from Harpur Bochhan Panchayat connecting Baya River to Dumardah chaur. That canal all of sudden changed the fate of the land of that chaur. Manoj and his friends started farming in their land with Kharif and rabbi crops but they were not getting as much from the farming as the other farmers were taking out of it and therefore they started working on the alternative uses of that land.

With assistance provided by district fisheries office Samastipur and the district administration, they have come up with the project.They have dug 12 ponds, measuring 1 acre each with the depth of 20ft near the canal’s chaur side outlet and interconnected the ponds through pipes.

Again the farmers ask the panchayat to build all weather roads to collect the harvest from that chaur through MNREGA and gramsabha approved the soling road connecting the chaur. Meanwhile fisheries department accorded them a solar powered pump as well as another pump to cater the ponds in case loss of water. They got 90% subsidy on total cost of 4.5 lacs for pump and solar system and per acre RS.1.6 lac contributed by fisheries department for digging the pond.

In the start of rainy season last year farmers used the canal to fill their all pond and taken 45 days to fill all the ponds meanwhile the other farmers used the canal water for irrigation.

The total cumulative water area of the ponds is 12 acres. Manoj Kumar, Poonam Devi, Amarjeet Roy, Ramphal Chaurasia, Arun Chaurasia, Shankar Singh and Rajendra Chaurasia are the beneficiaries. They use 5000 seed per acre. 120 quintals of feed in a year per acre and they got 35 quintals as produce per acre last year. In this way by the joint support of both Fisheries Department and MNREGA the beneficiaries have made a good livelihood.