The granaries of india lie in the northern plains and delta region. What would be the plight of the farmers and the common man if this dispute goes on?
Answers
The Cauvery delta region, widely regarded as the granary of Tamil Nadu, has shrunk, with cultivable lands increasingly deteriorating into waste lands — this is the finding of a recently concluded study undertaken by retired professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) S. Janakarajan.
Funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the study was conducted between 2014 and 2016 and covers a period spanning almost four decades, beginning from the 1970s. Through the comparison of the geographic information system (GIS) imagery for May 2014 with the 1971 toposheet obtained from the National Remote Sensing Centre at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the researcher has tracked land use and changes to land cover to show that the delta region has shrunk by 20% due to anthropogenic factors such as diversion of land for non-agricultural purposes, as well as factors linked to climate change.