PALAKKAD: The government has approved the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme’s (MNREGS’) proposal to assign 11 more tasks to the Scheduled Tribe promoters so that they could encourage the tribal communities to take to farming on their land.This is in addition to the earlier duties assigned to the promoters by the Scheduled Tribe Department.The proposal was submitted to the government by the Block Programme Officer (BPO) of the MNREGS, P V Radhakrishnan, in Agali, Attapadi.The new batch of 135 tribal promoters will be given a one-day training session in Attapadi on March 9, and they will be employed for a period of one year. The training will be conducted by the Department for the Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The newly-identified eleven tasks are intended to provide more incentives to Adivasis to cultivate their land and thereby secure gainful employment.The new tasks include registration of all tribal families and providing job cards to them, convening of ‘Oorukoottams’ and deciding upon the projects to be implemented.The promoters should also ensure tribal participation and constituting ‘Ooru Vikasana Samithis (OVS), which in turn will select one person as ‘MATE’ from among the workers, for monitoring the work, making arrangements for social audit and co-coordinating with other departments like agriculture and animal husbandry, to secure pump sets, seeds, fertilizers, saplings and other equipment.Now that MNREGS has been widened to include dairy farming and poultry farming, it should also be ensured that these benefits are not cornered by others.“The scheme should provide assistance to Adivasis,” said Baburaj, an Adivasi farmer who is also the ‘Moopan’ of Nayanampetty Ooru. He demanded that the Girijan Service Co-operative Societies in Pudur ,Kottathara, Sholayur, Agali and Mukkali in Attapadi, which had become defunct, should be revived and the Adivasis should be provided soft loans as well as agricultural implements. The Scheduled Caste and Tribe Welfare Department and the Co-operative Department should initiate measures to help the tribal community, so that they could get a reasonable return from agriculture, said the Adivasi president of Pudur grama panchayat Maruthi Suresh.“There were currently 8559 Scheduled Tribe families in Attapadi, of which only 1023 families have taken to agriculture. Nearly 24,000 acres of land is being held by the Adivasis and the average holding of each Adivasi family in Attapadi is 2.77 acres. “But only 12 per cent of this land is being utilised for farming activities. The remaining land will be converted into farm land by encouraging the tribal people,” Radhakrishnan said.“Agricultural activities returned to Adivasi settlements following a `64-crore special action plan in conjunction with the Scheduled Tribe department,” Radhakrishnan added.Registering under the MNREGS scheme has proven beneficial for even those who were already engaged in farming activities.The scheme is catching on in several settlements, with patches of barren land being converted into profitable agricultural fields.
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