The state government worked in parallel to solve the irrigation and water availability problems to risk-proof farmers from the vagaries of monsoons. While the Digvijaya Singh government had launched the ‘pani roko’ programme in 2002-03 after two successive monsoons failed, the initiative was neither scaled nor funded, and as a consequence, local water bodies and traditional storage structures had been rendered unusable by 2006-07. Starting then, Chouhan started clearing the backlog of various stalled irrigation programmes and promoting water harvesting and conservation at the micro level.

Madhya Pradesh today boasts of two and a half million hectares of irrigated land, a three and a half times increase in the last eight years. As against the national average of 52 per cent of un-irrigated area under farming, Madhya Pradesh has reduced this ratio to 44 per cent, starting at a very high number when Chouhan assumed the office.

New water management techniques

The success of the water management programmes of the state has been acknowledged widely. A recent Reuters report on the Dewas model – named after the water conservation programme launched in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh – described how farmers from Maharashtra and Rajasthan are travelling to Dewas to understand micro-irrigation techniques better. The report described how monsoon ponds eight to 10 foot deep and one hectare wide to irrigate every eight to 10 hectares of land have resulted in output productivity increase of up to 300 per cent. The model works on farmers joining hands to give up small portions of their land holdings to create these community water storage ponds.

When Madhya Pradesh was bifurcated to create Chhattisgarh in 2000, almost all the power generation assets of the undivided state went to Chhattisgarh. The mutual rivalry of the then chief ministers, Digvijaya Singh of Madhya Pradesh and Ajit Jogi of Chhattisgarh, resulted in the power supply commitments to Madhya Pradesh being completely reneged. Consequently, Madhya Pradesh faced long urban and rural power cuts from 2000 to 2003. Chouhan recognised that this emotive electoral issue from 2003 had to be addressed. He worked on increasing the power generation capacity within the state, tapping not just coal-based mega power plants but also commissioning hydro and renewable projects at scale.

The state today accounts for 6 per cent of India’s installed capacity, bettered only by Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. Madhya Pradesh today is a power-surplus state, and has used this surplus in innovative ways for agriculture.

Between 2009 and 2013, Chouhan worked on signing advance power purchase agreements to be used only for the wheat crop, which has a cycle of 110 days in the winter months. The government asked farmers to pay about 60 per cent of their cost of power, paying the rest in subsidies, but guaranteed daily availability, selling more than three million ‘winter connections’. Since farmers had the mechanisation visibility on the back of assured power, they could invest in their farming operations with certainty, and consequently, the area under wheat cultivation rose by two million hectares per year almost every year in this period. This power was also used to operate a well-developed canal network to pump water to distant villages, enabling even small-scale farmers to show increased yields.

Excess power has been put to another interesting use in the state. While the country still grapples with the environmental impact of river linking, Madhya Pradesh has adopted a simple way to link the mighty Narmada river with Kshipra, a river which is important for the western part of the state. Narmada flows between two mountain ridges, while Kshipra originates on the other side of the northern flank of Narmada. The state government invested in laying pipelines from Narmada to the origin point of Kshipra, pumping water up the mountain and then letting Kshipra take its normal course. This arrangement is operated reliably only because power availability is not an issue in the state.

The Chouhan government was among the earliest adopters of soil testing practices and issuing soil health cards, an area of investment also for the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. The state tied up with private parties to extend these cards to farmers, helping them control their use of chemicals and fertilisers. About a quarter of the estimated 11 million farmers in the state now have these cards. The programme is now running nationally, with the Modi government at the centre making a push for it after the programme’s success in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

Transforming connectivity

In the early 1990s, if one travelled from Maharashtra, Gujarat or Rajasthan to Madhya Pradesh, one would know that the state boundaries had changed as soon as the ride became bumpy. The Madhya Pradesh roads – or rather, whatever existed of them – were hardly motorable. Chouhan invested in creating a network of 80,000 km of all-weather roads across the state in the last decade. This area is still work in progress, but the state aims to connect every village with a motorable road, extending the benefit of connectivity to the rural populace.

The results of this improvement in infrastructure was visible in 2011-12, when Madhya Pradesh replaced Punjab as the grain bowl of India, producing almost 20 million tonnes of grains. This achievement was recognised by the then United Progressive Alliance government, awarding Chouhan the ‘Krishi Karman’ award for the year. The Narmadapuram division formed in 2008, comprising the districts of Hoshangabad, Harda and Betul, is now the national hub for wheat cultivation, also benefitting from the administrative freedom it got after being recognised as a separate division.

In the adjoining districts of Raisen and Narsingpur, the government moved farmers from the failing soybean crop to paddy, providing assistance for growing long-grain rice. The productivity of paddy growth in these districts has improved fourfold in the last decade, with several farmers supplying their produce for exports to food processing firms.