Inspiring Stories-in-brief
An experience of collectivization - Chhapuram
Chhapuram is a typical tribal village under Khurji GP of Nandapur block. Its located around 47 km from the District headquarter Koraput and 7 Km from the Block headquarter Nandapur. Chhapuram consist of 2 hamlets. This is a representative tribal village of Koraput where Gadbaadibasi lives with their own lifestyle. The literacy status of the village is very low and it comes around 14% only. The village doesn’t have school and the children of the village go to nearby village for schooling.
A couple of years back, kharif agriculture and livestock, two major livelihood options were the only liveihod option the community thought of. Seasonal migration, supplemented their cash need. Land holding among families was abysmally low at 2 acres, that too only 11 families were having land holdings


PRADAN consolidated four villages Chapuram, Khurji, Kirajhola and Kamarguda to form a PG in the year 2019 and formed Maa Durga Mahila Utpadaka Sangha. The organisation facilitated the process of PG formation helped the villagers to plan for kharif agriculture in a synchronized way and did the livelihood plan. The livelihood plan focused on optimum use of the existing irrigation to cultivate round the year vegetable in a cluster approach. In village level planning, they came up with an irrigation plan covering 20 acres of land from a perennial stream.
The PG farmers decided to grow vegetables like Tomato, Chilly and Cole crops apart from ginger during the current year. As decided, they prepared land to grow ginger three months ahead of the normal season and did transplantation accordingly. Meanwhile, they constructed a low cost shed net house for raising nursery bed to prevent from heavy rain fall. Besides, they were advised to apply tricoderma with FYM to prevent fungal disease and organic manures like jeeva-mruta and Handi khata. They took up Cauliflower and Chilly in the Ginger field as intercropping and Pigeon pea in the ridge lines
Due to this irrigation infrastructure farmer done ginger cultivation in the month of April that is 3 months ahead of other farmers and got a significant income. This year around 12 farmers initiated early ginger, cauliflower and chilly in 8 acres of land. The distributions of standing crops under cultivation are as follows. So, in total 18 acres of ginger, 5 acres of tomato, 5 acres of cabbage and cauliflower, taken up by 35 farmers. Now the standing crops could convince a beholder of a whooping produce in the next 15 days.The process of change in Chhapuram is quite visible. The village which was struggling for food sufficiency a couple of years back; has turned into a role model for other villages. The perceptible change is not limited to their economies, but also socially the drastic change is quite evident. Women participate collectively in meetings, take their own decision, and influence other neighbouring women to emulate