The System of Rice Intensification, known to increase rice yields by following a few simple rules, is spreading throughout Bihar, thanks to an award-winning film that educates farmers - Article from India Together

Article and Image courtesy: India Together
Author: Shoma Chatterji

SRI stresses proper management of water with an appropriate irrigation system that allows water to be "put on" and "taken off" from the field at certain intervals. The system was developed in Madagascar in the 1980s and has been successfully tried in 25 countries across the world.

Meghnath Bhattacharya and Bijoo Toppo have won two awards at the 58th National Film Awards announced earlier this year. One of them is for Loha Garam Hai, previously reviewed on these pages, on the ill effects of industrialization on environment, health and livelihood. The other one is for Ek Ropa Dhaan, declared the Best Film on Agriculture.

The 26-minute film traverses the fields of Bihar to explain, educate and promote a new technology in paddy cultivation that the locals have given the name Ek Ropa Dhaan from which the film borrows its title. The film takes a look at the basic problem of food. The first of our survival needs - and points to a way of solving the problem, known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), to boost agricultural yields. The advantages of this relatively simple technique is that it needs less fertilizers, seeds, insecticides, labour and most importantly, much less water than is needed in normal modes of cultivation. The water needed is only about one-third of what is used in the traditional system of growing paddy.

The opening frame of the film shows a green farming field, with a voice-over explaining the acute scarcity of food, mainly among the farming population. One of the farmers interviewed in the film says that most farmers produce less than subsistence levels and can barely live for three months out of what they normally produce. The Ek Ropa Dhaan technique has bettered their lives in a significant way. This farming method was introduced by a Catholic priest, Father Henri de Laulanie, in Madagascar, around 25 years ago.

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