By Our Correspondent
Sarlahi, July 11: With over a week of dry spell, paddy plantation has started becoming affected in several parts of Sarlahi. Cracks have developed in the paddy fields as they are drying up owing to a lack of irrigation facilities and rain. 
In the few days of torrential rainfall that lasted from June 29 to July 3, several farmers began paddy plantation. But much to their disappointment, there hasn’t been any rainfall since then. Farmers who have access to irrigation pumps are continuing to cultivate their lands.
But, most people like Hemraj Devkota, a farmer from Sagarnath of Ishwarpur Municipality Ward No. 4, fear that their paddy plants are drying up due to insufficient rain. “Farmers are increasingly getting worried. With the monsoon coming to an end, vast acres of fields remain barren when they aren’t supposed to be,” laments Devkota.
Although, the ward office has dug half a dozen boreholes for irrigation, most of them aren’t operational, claims Devkota. Paddy transplanted by pumping water into the farm in the first week of July has also started withering. Nearly half of the farmland depends on rainfall for agriculture. Lack of adequate rainfall means the chances of large swathes of farmland remaining fallow are high this year.  With no other alternatives for irrigation, farmers from Ishwarpur, Lalbandi, Haripurwa, Chandranagar, Parsa expectantly gaze at the sky above to answer their prayers.
It’s ironic how incessant rainfall in several parts of the country is submerging settlements, and sweeping away entire communities while some parts have been receiving minimal sporadic rainfall. 
According to District Agriculture Knowledge Centre, Malangwa Acting Chief and Agriculture Extension Officer Kamal Dev Prasad Kushwaha, paddy cultivation in Sarlahi stretches over 43,000 hectares of land. “However, due to insufficient rain, only 30 to 35 per cent of the farmland has been cultivated by the first week of July,” he informed.