Traditional Cultivation Practices of Water Chestnut in Northeast India (Assam): A Field Survey

Water chestnut is grown as a food crop in most of the states in India. Despite having high medicinal value and economic importance, Indian farmers still follow traditional cultivation practices for water chestnuts. Being informal in nature and not being considered mainstream economic activities, cultivation practices of aquatic food crops like water chestnut, have not received due importance. Thereby, the modernization of the cultivation practices has been ignored. As the cultivation practice is not well documented and not readily available, it could not draw the agricultural researchers’ attention for their intervention. Hence, the current research aimed to gather information on the traditional cultivation process of water chestnut along with documenting the challenges in the entire process. To achieve the goal, a detailed survey was conducted from 3 sites that were purposely-selected from the north-eastern districts of Assam, India. It was noticed that the water chestnut cultivation across the sites follows the common five phases: seedling preparation, cleaning of water bodies, transplanting, inter-culture, and harvesting. Cleaning of water bodies and harvesting were found to be more difficult and time-consuming activities. As the farmers need to remain inside the adverse aquatic environment for 5–6 h/day, they suffer from various health-related issues, including body-pain, itching, and swelling in the lower body. The current research findings would facilitate exploring the future research avenues towards increasing productivity, thereby enhancing livelihood and motivating the researchers to come up with intervention strategies for the reduction of the drudgery of the farmers.