Fourtyeight-year-old Narayana Reddy of Gandlaparthi Kottapalli village of Gandlaparti mandal in the district is a sad
man today, after chopping off all fruit bearing sweet lime trees in his 15-acre farm.
“I will go in for cotton (cotton is a rain fed crop in the district) from the next season on. All that sweet lime has left me with is debts in the last three years. Unless my borewell is recharged, I can’t even consider going back to sweet lime,” said Narayana Reddy, who says his brief tenure as a farmer independent of rains was over.
Elsewhere in Nallamada mandal of the district, Suryanarayana Reddy has sunk in more than 15 borewells in the last two years alone, the
last one reaching a depth of 900 feet and costing him Rs 5 lakhs, only to see the little water empty to a trickle in three months. He has decided to leave his mango farm dry and go in search of work in Bangalore.
This is the story of several thousands of farmers across the district, who shifted to horticulture over the years, taking the suggestions of the Horticulture Department and the government, in an attempt to break away from the vagaries of nature, at least reasonably, says Narasimhulu, a farmer and social activist from the district.
While some have chopped away those trees which were in their prime fruiting age, some have left it dry while another section is spending lakhs of rupees on watering the plants by transporting water from other places through tankers, in the hope to sustain the plants until the next rainy season in hope of good rain.