Sundargarh administration to activate LI points

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ROURKELA: As majority pockets of the rainfed Sundargarh district are facing an imminent droughtlike situation, the Sundargar..

ROURKELA: As majority pockets of the rainfed Sundargarh district are facing an imminent droughtlike situation, the Sundargarh district administration stepped in on Friday to operationalise defunct Lift Irrigation (LI) points to reduce the adverse impact to someextent.The District Collector Rupa Roshan Sahu on Friday reviewed the possibility of opertionalising the defunct LI points with the department and WESCO officials.
The collector said the meeting worked out the number of LI points needing repairs, adding the power utility would prepare an estimate to facilitate repair work in a week.She said all tehsildars accompanied by farmers' bodies would crosscheck functioning of LI points and the agriculture and revenue officials would monitor and ascertain status of crop in all 262 gram panchayats.

Officially the district has irrigation cover of 76,000 hectares (ha) of the total 3.15 lakh farmland and paddy cultivation has been taken up in 2.14 lakh ha. If sources are to be believed, less than 20,000 ha have access to irrigation as the minor irrigation projects and the medium irrigation projects are of little help with water not reaching the tail ends in the absence of adequate water at the sources.

Ironically, the rainfall is gauged at the block headquarters as agriculture authorities inevitably fail to accurately assess the situation at gram panchayats in farflung areas.