Government initiatives to to tackleshifting cultivation
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The “inconsistency and incongruence among policies of various departments” of the Central and state governments regarding shifting cultivation needs to be done away with, says the latest NITI Aayog report on bringing transformative changes to shifting cultivation. “Central as well as State government departments of forests and environment, agriculture and allied departments often have divergent approaches towards shifting cultivation. This creates confusion among grassroots level workers and jhum farmers,” the report observes.
In the uplands of northeast India—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura—shifting cultivation, locally known as jhum, continues to be a dominant mode of food production and the economic mainstay of many rural households