Padma awardee farmer who used creativity to transform desolate land into a gorgeous orchard

The Padma Shri award 2022 has been given to Amai Mahalinga Naik, an enterprising farmer from Karnataka’s Adyanadka hamlet in Dakshina Kannada. Naik transformed a barren area of land into an oasis by employing the Zero-Energy Micro-Irrigation System. To supply water to his property, Naik constructed six tunnels by himself. In the hills surrounding it, he also built 300 percolation ditches by himself. Naik’s goal became a reality after years of hard effort and several failed attempts.

“I was working at a landlord’s house at the age of 22. One of them gave me a piece of barren land on a steep hill. There was no water source. I didn’t have money to spend on irrigation or dig borewells. So I started digging a tunnel into hard rocks to reach groundwater,” Amai Mahalinga Naik told