Asha for Education

The floods in Tamil Nadu in November 2015 rendered several thousands of acres of land uncultivable. Rains continued through 9 December. Large swaths of the city and the district were inundated, with thousands of residents marooned by flood waters and over 60,000 hectares of farmland inundated. The damage caused by the floods to the agricultural lands were multi-dimensional ranging from huge sand deposit up to 10 feet, land broken/washed away, altered land patterns, debris, uneven landscape.

INSPIRE team led by Revathi visited the villages during the 3rd week of November assessed the nature and extent of the damage, took soil samples for testing and began documenting what needs to be done. The INSPIRE team visited almost all the affected villages and estimated the different level of the damage through the initial interactions/survey/photos & video recordings and took this to various stakeholders attention. In the entire district, 122 villages were very badly affected out of which 45 villages had extreme devastation of farmlands which could not be retrieved by the farmers themselves. The farming communities shared their inability to retrieve their lands as they believed it would cost them 2-5 lakhs per acre and would be a lifetime task.

The INSPIRE team has been working across 45 villages and have recovered over 2500 acres of land.