THE WONDER GRASS
There is nothing but sand interspersed with rocks, reflecting sunlight in all its resplendence. Travelling northwest of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, suddenly one comes across a hutment surrounded by a carpet of yellow-grey shrubs clothing the surface. In the heart of the Thar desert, where eking out a living is as difficult as anywhere else in the world, the sewan grassland is comparable to an oasis. Through hundreds of years, it has provided vital nutritious fodder for the cattle of the pastoral inhabitants of the area.
Not so long back, vast stretches of rolling sewan rangelands could be seen extending to the horizon. Not any more. Sewan (Lasiurus sindicus) is difficult to find in Bikaner district of Rajasthan. Regrets Ishwar Prakash, emeritus professor at the Desert Regional Station, Jodhpur: "Development has depleted genetic resources adapted to a particular ecological niche.'
The Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojna, which has brought water and water-intensive agriculture from the Sutlej river in Punjab to Rajasthan, is to blame. By March 1998, Rs 343 crore had already been spent on the project. The main canal and its network of channels pass through some of the most important sewan pastures. Here, land has been cleared for agriculture. Indiscriminate irrigation has greatly increased soil moisture, threatening the survival of the remaining sewan rangelands; the grass is not adaptive to a high soil moisture regime. Also, the Jaisalmer rangelands are overgrazed: the number of cattle grazed here exceeds the carrying capacity by 6-15 times.
Sewan rangelands are spread in the low rainfall (100-150 mm) zone of Bikaner, Jaisalmer and Barmer districts. Popularly known as the king of the desert, sewan is remarkably adapted to the desert. Extremely finicky about the timing and amount of rainfall, sewan's roots can however lie low and wait for years at a stretch, despite recurring periods of drought. A couple of showers is all it takes for the grass to maximise its production. It has a high protein content of 7-11 per cent. Local communities swear that the butter and milk from cattle fed with this grass is a distinctly darker shade of yellow and highly enriched. Sewan is cut and stored by the villagers for use in times of drought and scarcity. The grass can be stored for up to 10 years. Regular browsing and moderate cutting are good for the grasslands and promote growth.
"It is unfortunate that we have still not fully understood the ecology of sewan," says Suresh Kumar, scientist at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI), Jodhpur. Karan Singh, 75, a farmer from Ramgarh village, 65 km from Jaisalmer, says: "The generations to come will never see this grass."