Padma Awards 2024: Hailing from the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Kamachi Chellammal has grabbed national attention by bringing about a revolution in the coconut farming sector.
The 67-year-old, popularly known as ‘Nariyal Amma’, has been selected for the prestigious Padma Shri award for her outstanding contribution to organic coconut farming.
She explained that in order to keep the soil moist during the post-rainy season, she mulches the plantation with coconut leaves and husks.
The process of coating the soil with mulches—such as bark, wood chips, leaves, and other organic materials—in order to enhance the soil’s quality and retain moisture is known as mulching.
According to Chellammal, her technique not only minimizes soil moisture loss but also lowers the number of weeds, both of which are critical for a productive coconut farm.
Additionally, rather than using dangerous pesticides, she embraced an Integrated Pest Management approach, using trap plants (which differ from plantation to plantation) to draw insects and emit pheromones into the atmosphere that interfere with the insects’ normal mating cycle. This process helped Chellammal to control the pest population on her coconut plantation.
Chellammal also implemented coconut-based multi species cropping by effectively utilising interspaces on the 10 acres of land in the plantation. This system of integrated farming enabled her to overcome the challenges of the low market price of coconut before the implementation of MSP and helped her to generate more revenue.
She employs a variety of plants, including gladiolus, tuberose, marigold, sweet potatoes, bananas, groundnuts, pineapples, elephant foot yams, and green veggies, for multi-species farming at her plantation in the Rangachang area of South Andaman.
Chellammal also persuaded other farmers to switch to organic farming over time.
