Farming a Beach

Courtesy of Brian Orland An embankment on the Dorpang River, a tributary of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, in this Feb. 6, 2013 photo.

BORALAPAR, Assamâ€"Jagot Chekanidhara, a 50-year-old local schoolteacher, mounds up a wall of sand. Nearby, his sister Lakhimi digs a row of holes. It looks like seaside fun-in-the-sun, but this is no beach and no child’s play.

The bund is to help nurture their subsistence potatoes, sweet peas and other winter crops by helping to channel water and retain compost, and the holes are for transplanting chilies.

Less than a half kilometer away flows the Dorpang River, a north-bank tributary of the Brahmaputra in upper Assam, whose embankments repeatedly overflow and burst, drowning paddy fields and depositing sand and pebbles that are washed down from the distantly visible hills of Arunachal Pradesh. Climate change projections for the Brahmaputra river system warn that the hazard risk for flash flood-prone north bank tributaries like the Dorpang River will only worsen.

Courtesy of Brian Orland Jagot Chekanidhara, a farmer in Assam, working in his field, in this Feb. 18 photo.

The Chekanidharas’ village, Boralapar, has long experienced floods, and farmers once welcomed them for the nutrients they delivered just before planting time. But now, the floods have intensified, dumping soil-killing sand and debris. Farming is becoming untenable, threatening the economic base of this agrarian community.

The Chekanidharas are fighting a losing battle. “You hear that sound â€" kish kish, kish kish â€" it’s all sand,” said Ms. Chekanidhara, 33, as she struck the coarse, tightly-packed granules with her shovel. “Here, look at this,” she said, lobbing a golf ball sized pebble that she has unearthed.

Where fan-shaped fronds of areca nut trees once shaded their plot, now blackened, shriveled husks clatter overhead. “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead,” she mourned, counting the decaying trunks. “Our orange tree, dead. That little coconut palm, dead. The flood and sand will kill it all.”

The Chekanidharas still plant paddy and vegetable crops in their sandy soil, but Mr. Chekanidhara scoffs at the results. Nor do his neighbors fare any better. Between here and the river, a once-fertile area the size of several football fields is no longer farmable.

Partha Jyoti Das, who heads Aaranyak, a conservation organization based in Assam, noted that this village suffers from the combined impacts of flooding and sandcasting, the term used to describe the harmful deposits left by the flood. The syndrome has already wiped out whole villages in an area called Matmora, nearby Boralapar, detailed in Aaranyak’s 2009 report “Adapting to Floods on the Brahmaputra Floodplain.”

Where once vast fields of paddy nestled amid groves of papaya, banana, and coconut trees, now in Matmora there’s only a wasteland of sand. Able-bodied males have had to decamp to other parts of India like Kerala to work and send home remittances. Those who remain scrape by selling hand-woven cloth, local alcohol or fish. Entire communities cling to the sides of embankments, the only high ground around, awaiting the next flood.

Villages like Boralapar could all too easily be the next to share the fate of Matmora. For the present, the Chekanidharas eke out enough food for subsistence, plus earn cash to buy necessities like tea and sugar and oil. But to carry on and resist going the way of Matmora, the Chekanidharas and the other farmers in Boralapar will have to change their centuries-old traditional patterns of living. They’ll have to rethink what, when, and how to plant their paddy fields and vegetable gardens.

Courtesy of Brian Orland Lakhi Chekanidhara, a farmer in Assam, digging holes in her field, in this Feb. 16 photo.

For now, these farmers are still in coping mode. To make up for such poor soil, they dump bags upon bags of chemical fertilizer onto their fields. And they plow their fields six times instead of three, an extra week of hard labor, to bury the sand and pebbles under fertile earth.

But even with this added expenditure of money and labor, their fields are yielding half the amount they did only 10 years ago when floods deposited natural fertilizer. Economically, their present mode of agriculture is unsustainable. All it takes is one flood to knock out the entire crop, and their investment in fertilizer is lost. The debt on which the fertilizer was bought remains.

In each of the holes she has just dug in the sand, Ms. Chekanidhara carefully scooped a dose of cow manure mixed with ash - a debt-free nutrient boost for her baby chili plants. But she wondered how long she can keep ahead of the encroaching silt, one nutrient dose at a time.

Her brother has placed more faith in a different way of nurturing the family’s ongoing subsistence: education. His 17-year-old son, Sunil, sits up night after night by the light of a noxious kerosene lamp, cramming the trigonometric equations he will need to memorize for the statewide exam. His higher education and employment prospects largely hinge on the exam results.

If he fares well, as the Chekanidharas hope, then one day Sunil’s steady salary will be able to buy with hard cash much of the subsistence staples they now produce on their own.

Brian Orland, a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, is studying climate change adaptation along the Brahmaputra River, where the environment challenges the region faces are likely to be repeated in other parts of developing Asia. His dispatches will appear regularly in India Ink. Last month, he wrote about the costs and benefits of dams on the Brahmaputra.