At least 150 families in Parlanka, a village in Panskura in West Bengal's Purba Medinipur district, spend their days tending flower beds on the char land of the Kangsabati river. The growers here plant roses above all, so although the village is called Parlanka, the area is better known as the 'rose village', the Kolkata daily Ei Samay reported on 30 September.
Parlanka, in the Maishora gram panchayat area of Panskura, is a farming village. The Kangsabati flows past it, and its farmers have grown roses on the river's char for generations. Other flowers and vegetables are grown in the village too. Growing flowers is both the growers' living and their passion, the paper wrote, and they spend the whole day looking after their plots on the riverbank.
Training in better flower farming came to the village through one of its residents. Anupam Samanta, who works for the panchayat department, also grows roses on his own land. At his initiative the village's first government training in flower farming began in 2011. He later arranged, through government and private programmes, for Parlanka's rose growers to be trained in improved methods of flower cultivation.
Flower farming has also brought the village together. In 2012 Anupam Samanta and two flower growers, Abhiram Das and Arun Samanta, started a Durga Puja in the village, which the growers themselves soon took charge of. It is now in its fifteenth year; flower farmers from the neighbouring villages of Kishorpur and Gurtala join in, and the pandal is decorated with fresh flowers from the growers' own plots.
"Flower farming is what holds us together," said Subhash Ghara, a rose grower.
The report is by Diganta Manna, Ei Samay's correspondent in Panskura. It does not give the area under roses, the varieties grown, yields or market prices.
Photo: SAIDUL HASAN / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Ei Samay
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