The residents of Gopalpur staged a dharna in front of the district Collectorate here demanding establishment of a tehsil office in their locality, instead of at Bahanaga.
The standoff pertaining to setting up the tehsil office still remains unresolved as the residents of Bahanaga and Gopalpur are demanding it to be established at their own localities for about the last five years. Earlier, they have held demonstrations on several occasions to press for their demand.
The State Government in 2007 had announced that each block would have a tehsil office. Under the policy, the villages of Bahanaga block which were till then under Soro tehsil demanded a tehsil office at Bahanaga.
However, the State Government had initially declared the tehsil to be set up at Gopalpur but subsequently with pressure mounting up decided to establish it at Bahanaga. It had to reconsider its decision when the residents of Gopalpur too demanded the tehsil at their own locality by resorting to agitation. As the residents of both the areas opposed each other, the tehsil office went controversial and was yet to be set up at a place. Soro continues to be the tehsil headquarters of Bahanaga till date.
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Besides cattle, he said, there are two indigenous varieties of buffalos such as Chilika and Kalahandi listed as Nos. 11 and 13 in the FAO list which are also unique. “The Chilika variety is the only one that thrives on saline weeds and its curd can be preserved in room conditions for five days.” The Kalahandi variety is the best milk breeder, he added.”
Bishnupada Sethi, Dr Sanat Mishra, MK Ghosal, D Behera, N Sahoo, PK Sahu and PK Rout also spoke on bullock farming system and indigenous varieties. RN Senapati, Dr Saujendra Swain, Piyush Rout, Prakash Nayak, Sanjeev Chadha, Dr Balaram Sahu and Natabar Sarangi spoke on subjects like mainstreaming urban farming in Bhubaneswar city planning, food sovereignty and traditional varieties of rice, grass root innovations and traditional knowledge systems for monitoring organic farming and food preservation.
The last session was chaired by Jagdananda and attended by Arabind Behera, Prof Radhamohan, Sudarsan Das, Babu Ambat, DK Roy and Dr GN Indresha.
The Young Scientist Award was presented to Dr Anuj KS Parihar, Research Associate of NAIP on Carbon Finance, OUAT (Bhubaneswar). The theme of the next congress was selected as ‘Environment and Climate Change’.
The Declaration of the Odisha Environment Congress 2013 included: (1) Impact of environment on agriculture and vice versa should be given importance in policy formulation; (2) There should be appropriate balance between economic development and environment to fulfil minimum need and improve quality of life of people of the State; (3) In order to ensure food security, Odisha should adhere to an “Evergreen green revolution” adopting organic farming and indigenous knowledge; (4) Since considerable portion of the State’s population comprise youth, efforts should be made to make agriculture a profitable venture to attract more and more unemployed youth to take this as a profession; (5) Efforts should be there to promote climate-smart agriculture practices for ensuring food security through sustainable agriculture and enhanced livelihood while adopting to climate change and conserving biodiversity, natural resources, cultural resources, culinary resources and environmental services; (6) There is a need for developing certain pilot models on group approach of locally-adopted and sustainable agriculture (GAlASA) taking into consideration indigenous technology and knowledge (ITK) local genetic resources, organic manures, micro and macro climatic conditions and also environment.