Land Shaping Models for Enhancing Agricultural Productivity in Salt Affected Coastal Areas of West Bengal – An Economic Analysis

The management of agricultural land to improve farm income in coastal saline areas is quite challenging because, firstly, most of the agricultural area is characterised by monocropping with low-yielding rice varieties during kharif season. Under such fragile environment sustaining the livelihoods of these resource poor farmers become a real challenge both for technology developers as well as policy makers. To increase the farm income under the coastal saline environment, strategies have been taken up to increase the adoption of the salt resistant crop varieties and more importantly harvesting, storing and appropriate management through different kinds of land shaping technologies. The study pertains to primary survey on farm households, in South and North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. The sample farmers were drawn from two blocks, six villages and total sample size of 180 farm households of which half were the beneficiary farmers and the rest was non-beneficiary farmers. In the coastal area the land shaping technique, particularly farm pond and paddy-cum fish models, are unique technology for addressing the key challenges like land degradation (salinity), drainage congestion and scarcity of fresh water for irrigation and in turn have the potential to enhancing production, productivity, income and employment. These techniques particularly farm pond and paddy-cum-fish are a financially viable and attractive proposition for the coastal region. However for larger adoption of these technologies need to address some key issues like socio-economic constraints, some of which can be addressed by research level (e.g. land configuration, soil quality) some other at policy level (e.g. financial incentives).