Thanks to the farm ponds scheme initiated last year by the State Government, dovetailing the Centre’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a total of 1,000 agricultural fields owned by small and medium-scale cultivators in Erode district are now endowed with water bodies that assure water availability during the hot months ahead.
After the Agriculture Department identified the beneficiary farmers, the Rural Development Department got into deploying hundreds of farm labourers to dig up the ponds under MNREGS.
With the District Collector as chairman and Joint Director of Agriculture the Project Director, the scheme holds promise to the farmers.
Farmers covered under the scheme are now in a position to sustain their agricultural through the hot summer months, Joint Director of Agriculture M. Selvaraj said.