Channu Kunjam recalls the advice his father gave him when he took up farming 13 years ago: “Chemicals will ruin our land.” The resident of Aalnar village in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district says his family has always practised organic farming, relying on dried leaves and cow dung. A decade ago, Kunjam, who owns 2.54 hectares (ha), started preparing jeevamrit, a fertiliser made using ingredients available at home and in the fields. “We need cow dung and urine, jaggery, gram flour and soil to make jeevamrit. We leave it for seven days before using it on the field,” says Kunjam.
Rita Modiyam, a farmer from Masoodi village in the same district, says the use of jeevamrit has helped improve the productivity of her farm. “I was a subsistence farmer a decade ago. Today I grow enough crops to feed my family and sell at least 20 quintals (2,000 kg) of paddy and a variety of vegetables,” says Modiyam.
Kunjam and Modiyam are among the over 10,000 farmers in 110 villages of Dantewada who have received organic certification under the Large Area Certification (LAC) scheme in 2023-24. Launched in 2020-21, LAC is a Union government initiative to certify large contiguous areas such as hills, islands, or desert belts that have been traditionally organic. It is part of the Participatory Guarantee System-India, an organic certification framework introduced in 2011. Until now, only Ladakh (5,000 ha) and Lakshadweep (2,700 ha) had received LAC certification. With the 110 villages, which have 65,000 ha of farm area, Chhattisgarh has become the first state to have area certified under LAC.
Dantewada’s organic revolution was set in motion in 2013, after the district administration introduced a few initiatives with the agriculture department to expand organic farming. “Till then, it was practised at the farm level,” says Akash Badave of Bhoomgaadi Organic Farmers’ Producer Company Limited, a collective of organic farmers in Dantewada. “The agriculture department provided farmers with scientific inputs on how they could improve their original practices,” says Suraj Kumar Pansari, deputy director of agriculture, Dantewada district. For instance, farmers were trained to use System of Rice Intensification alongside organic farming. System of Rice Intensification is a crop management system that involves transplanting young, healthy seedlings by planting them in low density to strengthen their root systems. The process increases yield, reduces water use and improves soil quality.
The administration also introduced Mocho Badi (“my farm” in the local Halbi dialect), a scheme supported by the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), India’s largest iron ore producer. The scheme pro-vided subsidies for fencing, solar pumps and agricultural tools, enabling farmers to cultivate crops in two seasons instead of one. NMDC’s 2018 sustainability report claims that Mocho Badi increased yields and raised farmers’ incomes by 600 per cent.
A major turning point came in 2015 when farmers demanded an end to the sale of chemical fertilisers in government shops. The state agriculture ministry responded by releasing a roadmap to make Dantewada organic. In 2016, the district administration ceased promotion of chemicals. In 2018, farmers demanded a ban on the sale of chemical fertilisers even in private shops. The district administration, as a result, stopped renewing licences of private shops. Next, non-profit Nirmaan Foundation helped the villages apply for LAC, which considers all farmers in a village as one group. The non-profit helped the gram panchayats define the area and prepare a map with a detailed location of the organic farms. The gram panchayats also got all the farmers to endorse a pledge that they were following the organic standards and had not used synthetic inputs in the past three years. They also got the district administration to verify that no licences had been issued in the villages for the sale of synthetic inputs. By the end of 2022, the villages submitted their applications to the regional council, a third-party body responsible for verifying the area. The regional council then visited the villages, interviewed farmers and conducted random soil sample tests to check for pesticide residues. Next, a committee, appointed by the Union government, verified the documents. Finally, the national executive committee, the decision-making body for PGS-India, declared the entire area organic. “The certification process is done every year. The first certificate came in 2023 and the second in 2024,” says Badave.
Obtaining LAC is just the beginning for Dantewada. The district now aims to bring the remaining 117 villages under the certification process, ultimately making the entire district organic. “Organic farming requires more attention from the farmer during the growth stage, so people who have jobs are still not practising it,” says Badave. However, attitudes are changing. In Kuper village, which is yet to be included under LAC, the number of farmers using chemical inputs has already fallen from fewer than 10 to zero, says Charan Singh Yadav, a resident of the village.
The district administration has outlined three major goals till 2025. First, it aims to ensure that no farmer reverts to chemical farming. Second, it plans to increase organic production to meet local consumption needs, integrating organic produce into school midday meals, the Integrated Child Development Scheme and the Public Distribution System. “Cur-rently, only 40 per cent of the district’s demand is met by organic production,” says Mayank Chaturvedi, collector and district magistrate of Dantewada. The third goal is to diversify crops to include vegetables, fruits, pulses and millets for improved nutritional security. If successful, these plans could transform Dantewada, which is among the 112 districts classified as aspiration-al districts. But a lot more work needs to be done.
For instance, cropping intensity—the number of crops grown by a farmer on the same field in an agricultural year—in Dantewada is 101 per cent. This is below the national average of 155.4 per cent, as per the 2023-24 annual report of the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. The LAC programme covers certification fees of Rs 2,000 per ha for three years. These funds, released by the state government to the district administration, cover certification, capacity building and market hand-holding. Experts are apprehensive about who will bear the expenses for future certification, capacity building and marketing. “We need continued funding to train farmers,” says Badave.
Organic farmers also express disappointment that the rates for organic and chemical produce are the same in the local market. Premium pricing could act as an incentive to keep farmers interested in organic farming. A 2022 pan-India survey study published in Sustainability found that a lack of premium price is one of the deterrents for wider adoption of organic agriculture.
For now, organic farmers sit separately in the local market, allowing customers to differentiate them. “This is helpful and our vegetables get sold quickly,” says Kunjam, adding that higher prices will further incentivise organic farming in the district.
This was first published in the 16-28 February, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth