Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

egan to be used, primary because ‘ploughing became costly’ that is; they were not
available as cheap labor and expert ploughmen became rare. Tillers are even now very
rare.
Almost all farmers testified that although the first few crops using the modern farming
methods were extremely productive, later the yield began to decline. According to the
farmers ‘fertility of the soil’ began to decline, and soil itself became ‘poisonous’ so that
no fertilizer could make any impact. We have clearly seen that the paddy areas were
already fertile, the problem was intensive water-logging and salination, The Anaicut
seems to have reduced the salination to a certain extent, but the problem of water-logging
remained. Farmers pointed out that the area around Keranallur thodu would be
completely submerged during rainy season so that people would have to be shifted to safe
places. This resulted in the quest for a more permanent solution for water-logging, and
the project was formulated for a new water channel that linked Kadalundi River with
poorapparambu puzha, parallel to the Keranallur thodu. The project was approved by the
EMS ministry of 1967, in which Moideen kutty Haji the then MLA of Tirurangadi played
a major role, work began, and was abandoned a few years later, apparently because a few
engineers reported that the project was not feasible. So water-logging continued to be a
problem. This meant that farmers were forced to intensify production in areas without
water-logging, and continuous production without the normal crop rotation procedures to
retain the fertility of the soil might have resulted in the decline of fertility complained by
the farmers. All the farmers stated that the HYV seeds were no longer HYV after a few
years, and what the Block officers did was to replace them with other seeds, which would
suffer the same fate within a few years. It is also possible that ‘decline in fertility’ simply
referred to the fact that production did not meet the expectations of the farmers. They
argued that in the absence of continuous rise in productivity, agricultural production
would not be cost-effective, as the increased cost of production would mean that