In which one of the following States, more than 50% area is under Jhum cultivation?

Correct — D, Mizoram. Among the north-eastern states Mizoram is where jhum dominates most heavily — slash-and-burn is the ordinary form of farming there rather than one method among several, and at its height in the 1980s about seventy per cent of the population took part in it. Manipur, Assam and Sikkim all practise settled cultivation over most of their farmed land: Assam's Brahmaputra valley is wet-rice country, Manipur's Imphal valley likewise, and Sikkim terraces its slopes.

• (a)Manipur — Manipur does have jhum in its hill districts, but the Imphal valley — the state's agricultural core — is settled wet-rice land, so the share nowhere approaches half the state.
• (b)Assam — Assam is dominated by the Brahmaputra floodplain and by tea gardens. Jhum survives in the Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao hills alone, a small fraction of the state.
• (c)Sikkim — Sikkim farms terraced mountain slopes and has been a fully organic farming state since 2016; shifting cultivation is not its system.

Jhum is shifting or slash-and-burn cultivation: a forest patch is cleared and burnt, cropped mixed for two or three seasons while the ash-borne fertility lasts, then abandoned to regrow while the household moves on. The regrowth period, the jhum cycle, once ran fifteen to twenty years; population pressure has shortened it to four or five in many places, which is what turns the practice destructive.

The same system carries different names across the country — jhum in the North-East, podu in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, bewar and dahiya in Madhya Pradesh, kumri in the Western Ghats, and ladang in South-East Asia. Mizoram's own New Land Use Policy, first framed in 1984 and revived later, exists precisely to give jhum households a settled alternative.

• Jhum is practised by clearing and burning forest, cropping two or three seasons, then leaving the plot to fallow.
• A shortened jhum cycle, rather than the practice itself, is what degrades the soil and the forest.
• Mizoram's New Land Use Policy was framed to move households away from shifting cultivation.
• Regional names: podu, bewar, dahiya, kumri in India; ladang in Malaysia and Indonesia.

• Assuming Assam is the jhum state because it is the largest north-eastern state; its core is floodplain rice and tea.
• Treating shifting cultivation as intrinsically ruinous — the damage follows from the shortened fallow.

As the state with the greatest extent of jhum, or as the local name for shifting cultivation in a given region.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  'Podu' and 'Bewar' are regional names for which agricultural practice?

  • (a)Terrace cultivation
  • (b)Shifting cultivation
  • (c)Plantation agriculture
  • (d)Dry farming

  Answer(b) Shifting cultivation — podu in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, bewar in Madhya Pradesh, jhum in the North-East.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The main environmental problem with jhum cultivation today arises from

  • (a)the use of chemical fertilisers
  • (b)the shortening of the fallow period
  • (c)the growing of a single crop
  • (d)irrigation from hill streams

  Answer(b) the shortening of the fallow period — a cycle cut from fifteen years to four leaves the forest no time to regrow.