East Siang, once a rice surplus district, faces agricultural decline. A proposal for cooperative farming aims to rejuvenate its fallow lands and food security.
Itanagar, India Jul 17, 2026 ALN: East Siang is, by geography, an exception. Where most of our state rises in steep ridges and narrow valleys that permit only jhum, East Siang possesses something rarer and more precious – a wide belt of plain and gently undulating land between the foothills of the Eastern Himalaya and the boundary with Assam. For decades, this belt made East Siang one of the few districts capable of producing a rice surplus, feeding not only its own people but contributing to the food economy of the wider region.
However, this story has changed, and not for the better. The fields that once fed the district increasingly lie fallow. The labourers who once worked them have thinned to a trickle. A district that grew its own rice now leans, with growing dependence, on subsidised grain and on rice trucked in from outside the state. This is a structural problem, deserving the attention of every landowner, every gaon bura, every legislator, and every officer of the Department of Agriculture who claims to serve this district – and indeed, of every district that shares East Siang’s underlying predicament, even if none matches its scale.
This article is not another lament over what has been lost. It is a proposal – modest, specific, and deliberately small in its first step – for a pilot project that could test, within a cropping cycle or two, whether cooperative farming can bring East Siang’s fallow land back under the plough, and whether the model is worth carrying to other plain and valley pockets of the state.
The collapse did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For a long period, East Siang’s fields were cultivated substantially by migrant agricultural labourers, whose generations of skill in wet-rice cultivation and willingness to work the land of others for wages or share-tenancy kept the district productive. Local landowning families, many of them Adi, supplied the land; migrant labourers supplied the sustained daily toil that paddy cultivation in a flood-prone plain demands. However, that labour has been leaving for reasons that reinforce one another: the lack of secure long-term tenancy for tenant cultivators, the pull of better-paying and less precarious work outside the state, and the simple demographic fact that an ageing first generation of labourers is not being replaced by children who increasingly seek work elsewhere. The labourers went away, and the rice fields went fallow behind them.
Landowning families have not stepped into the gap in sufficient numbers. Many Adi households today have members in government service, small businesses, education, or study outside the district; cultivation of paddy by family labour alone, at a scale large enough to generate marketable surplus, is no longer the default choice it once was. A few committed landowners continue to till their own fields; the greater number do not, and their land sits idle – not because it has stopped being fertile, but because the arrangement that once activated it has broken down. The result is visible in every ration shop and market stall in East Siang: families that once ate rice grown within sight of their own homes now queue for subsidised grain or pay market rates for rice trucked in over hundreds of kilometres. A district with some of the best plain agricultural land in the state has become a net importer of its own staple food.
It is worth stating, in brief, how much of East Siang’s land is being left unused, because the scale is not widely appreciated outside the Department of Agriculture’s own files. Of the district’s cultivable area of roughly 40,920 hectares, official records have put current and other fallow land at around 6,430 hectares – larger than the district’s entire horticultural cropped area, and nearly half its kharif paddy area. Recorded paddy productivity, at roughly 2,250 kilograms per hectare, sits well above the state average of around 1,100 kilograms per hectare, yet still falls far short of the 4,000-plus kilograms per hectare routinely achieved on comparable irrigated plain land elsewhere in India. Only a modest share of the cultivable area is under assured irrigation; the rest depends on a monsoon that arrives, and departs, on its own schedule. None of this points to a ceiling imposed by soil or climate. It points to a ceiling imposed by the organisation of labour, capital, and irrigation – precisely the ceiling cooperative farming, properly supported, is designed to lift.
There is a further development that deserves to be stated plainly, because it changes fallow land from a problem of under-use into a problem of permanent loss. East Siang has no comprehensive land use policy, and agricultural land is not classified or zoned in any manner that restricts its conversion or sale. In this vacuum, a worrying pattern has taken hold: owners of fallow land, unable or unwilling to cultivate it themselves, are increasingly selling it off in small parcels – plots of five hundred to a thousand square metres are typical – through local brokers, often to buyers with no connection to farming at all. The proceeds are seen going overwhelmingly into consumption – motorcycles, mobile phones, refrigerators – or into a house or rental rooms in town. None of it returns to agriculture. Fallow land, however neglected, remains in the owner’s hands and can in principle be brought back under the plough; land sold to outside buyers rarely returns to cultivation at all.
This is the strongest, most urgent argument for the pilot proposed here. A landowning family with a genuine, organised, income-generating route back into cultivation – through a cooperative that supplies labour, machinery, and market access – has far less reason to sell off fallow land merely to realise some value from an otherwise idle asset. Cooperative farming does not merely raise production; it gives the landowner an active alternative to selling, at the precise moment the temptation to sell is greatest.
Cooperative farming is not a foreign idea grafted onto Adi society. It is a modern extension of customary practices of communal labour and mutual obligation long present in Adi villages – the same spirit behind the kebang’s traditions of collective responsibility, applied now to the paddy field. Several landowning families whose fields adjoin one another can come together to cultivate that land jointly, sharing labour, inputs, equipment, and ultimately the harvest and its proceeds.
An idea this significant a departure from existing practice should not be launched across the whole district at once. The wiser course – and the one this article proposes – is to identify a single cluster of one or two adjoining villages with a substantial, contiguous stretch of fallow land and a core group of landowners already disposed to cooperate, and run a pilot there first. The Department of Agriculture, working with the district administration and village councils, should choose the site on a few clear tests: genuine fallow land of meaningful size, willing landowners, and reasonable access to irrigation and a market or road link.
A pilot of this kind tests the sharing formula, the equipment-pooling arrangement, and the marketing tie-up at a scale where problems can be caught and corrected before being repeated elsewhere. It gives sceptical landowners in neighbouring villages a working example rather than a scheme on paper, and gives the department a controlled setting to learn what handholding, credit, and machinery investment a cooperative actually needs, before committing larger sums elsewhere. Only once the pilot has run a full cropping cycle or two, and shown a clear, creditable result – published honestly, difficulties and successes alike – should the model expand, cluster by cluster, to the rest of the district and, in time, to comparable pockets elsewhere in the state.
The mechanics need not be complicated. In the first season, participating families can record a written land-pooling agreement, requiring no registration, to begin joint cultivation. Once the group has a season’s track record, it can register as a cooperative society under the Cooperative Societies Act, opening a joint bank account and cooperative-sector credit. Further down the line, once ready for processing or branded marketing, it can graduate to a farmer-producer organisation, bringing access to the Government of India’s central FPO scheme, including handholding support for up to five years.
The single greatest cause of cooperative failure anywhere in India is an unclear or unfair sharing formula, so East Siang’s pilot should fix, in writing before the first seed is sown, how land, labour days, and input cost borne by each household translate into a share of the harvest. Landowners contributing land but no labour should get a fair rental-equivalent return; households contributing labour without land should get a wage or labour-share return; those who do both, a combined return. It only needs to be written down, signed, and witnessed before disputes arise.
A cluster of 15 to 20 hectares can justify the shared purchase or subsidised hire of a power tiller, a pump set, and a paddy thresher – investments that make no sense for one small holding but pay for themselves quickly when pooled. Cultivation need not stop at kharif paddy alone; the plain land can support a rice-fallow crop of pulses, oilseeds, or vegetables in rabi on residual soil moisture, a practice already validated across rice-fallow areas of eastern India – something an exhausted individual household rarely manages alone, but a cooperative with pooled equipment is built for.
Production reform without marketing reform is a wasted effort. East Siang’s farmers have long suffered a familiar imbalance in our local markets: small individual sellers facing organised buyers and brokers who set the price, leaving the cultivator with returns barely sufficient to justify the labour of harvest. A cooperative changes this arithmetic simply by changing who does the selling – aggregating the harvest and negotiating as one body, with the bargaining strength that volume provides. Registered cooperatives can also be onboarded onto the e-NAM electronic trading platform and linked with NAFED or the Food Corporation of India for assured procurement at minimum support price, and can, over time, invest jointly in a small rice mill, selling polished, properly labelled East Siang rice under its own name rather than raw paddy at the farm gate. Every tonne sold this way is also a tonne that no longer needs to be trucked in from outside the state.
None of this organises itself. The Department of Agriculture, with the Department of Cooperation and the district administration, should map fallow land in the pilot cluster, since this does not presently exist in usable form; redirect a share of machinery and input subsidy preferentially towards the pilot cooperative; arrange, in advance, a bridge-financing mechanism with the NABARD and the cooperative banking sector, since the most common cause of cooperative failure nationally is the withdrawal of support once initial grants end; and connect the cooperative’s produce with e-NAM, NAFED or FCI procurement, and institutional buyers such as hostels and government messes that presently source rice which could, in season, come from within East Siang itself.
Equally, the state government and district administration should treat the absence of any land use policy as urgent in its own right, separate from the pilot. Without some classification distinguishing agricultural land from land available for conversion, fallow plots will keep being subdivided and sold to outside buyers, shrinking the district’s farming base no matter how well the cooperative performs.
This is not a sentimental case. It is an employment and food security argument. Every hectare returned from fallow to active, double-cropped cultivation creates real labour-days of work – in land preparation, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, threshing, and post-harvest handling – performed by member households themselves. This is income that presently leaks out of East Siang entirely, paid instead to producers in other states whose rice fills our ration shops. Recovering even a fraction of the district’s own rice consumption through local cooperative production is a direct transfer of income from outside producers and transporters back into East Siang households.
Beyond the field, a working cooperative creates a second tier of local employment that individual subsistence cultivation never could: operators for shared machinery, staff for a cooperative mill, bookkeepers, and workers moving produce to market. A small network of such cooperatives, grown over five to ten years, is a realistic foundation for a genuine agro-processing sector in East Siang.
There is a quieter benefit too: in a region where land disputes and clan-based fragmentation already strain village cohesion, productively occupied land under a transparent, jointly agreed arrangement is also a form of social stability.
I write this not as an agricultural scientist but as someone who wishes to see the Adi community thrive. The revival of East Siang’s agricultural landscape through cooperative farming is not just a necessity; it is a pathway to restoring dignity, employment, and food security for its people.
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