As expected, paddy cultivation hits record high in Punjab, shatters state’s crop diversification dreams
Experts said it will be difficult to reduce the area under paddy as long as free power is provided to the agricultural sector, and alternative crops are not supported with high-yielding seeds and assured MSP
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Punjab has set a new record in agriculture — but not the one it hoped for. The area under rice cultivation has touched an all-time high of 32.46 lakh hectares — including 6.80 lakh hectares of Basmati — marginally up from 32.43 lakh hectares last year, according to field reports from the Punjab Agriculture Department. Though the increase seems slight as compared to the last year, the area under rice is already too high and instead of decreasing area under paddy, it marks a troubling continuation of a long-standing trend: the decline of crop diversification in the state. The cultivation of paddy and Basmati is almost over in the state now.
For nearly four decades, successive governments in Punjab have been striving to encourage farmers to grow alternative, less water-intensive crops such as maize, cotton, pulses, and sugarcane. Yet, paddy — heavily reliant on groundwater and backed by a guaranteed Minimum Support Price (MSP) — continues to dominate, pushing alternative crops further into the margins.
Cotton belt slips further into paddy
A significant shift has been recorded in Punjab’s cotton belt — comprising eight districts in the Malwa region: Bathinda, Fazilka, Mansa, Muktsar, Moga, Barnala, Sangrur, and Faridkot for the past few years. These districts either have registered an increase in paddy area or no decrease, reversing efforts to maintain or expand cotton acreage. This year also the trend was no different.
Bathinda saw paddy sown over 2.39 lakh hectares, up from 2.16 lakh hectares last year — an increase of 23,000 hectares. Fazilka recorded 1.30 lakh hectares under paddy, up from 1.28 lakh hectares. While Muktsar Sahib’s paddy area rose to 2.03 lakh hectares from 2.01 lakh hectares, Mansa’s increased to 1.46 lakh hectares from 1.44 lakh hectares last year. Barnala also recorded a small increase in the rice area from 1.14 to 1.15 lakh hectares.
The remaining cotton belt districts — Sangrur, Moga, and Faridkot — maintained similar paddy acreage as last year. Meanwhile, several other districts like Tarn Taran, Nawanshahr, Ropar, Patiala, Pathankot, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur, Firozpur, Amritsar, and Fatehgarh Sahib reported a little decline in paddy area, but this was not enough to offset the gains elsewhere.
Punjab’s diversification efforts began in earnest in the early 1980s. The goal: reduce the state’s dependency on water-intensive paddy and encourage cultivation of crops that are both economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
In 2002, the then Congress-led government introduced contract farming in hopes of breaking the paddy-wheat cycle. However, the initiative faltered. A more ambitious push came in 2012-13, when the SAD-BJP government under late chief minister Parkash Singh Badal unveiled a new agriculture policy aimed at shifting 12 lakh hectares away from paddy to crops like maize, cotton, and high-value vegetables. Yet the ground reality remained largely unchanged.
But the data paints a sobering picture. In the past decade, the combined area under paddy and Basmati accounts for 88 to 90 per cent and alternative kharif crops like cotton, maize, and sugarcane, rarely crossed 6 lakh hectares in most years and off late the area under these three crops has come down to merely around 3 lakh hectares.
Cotton, grown over 3.35 lakh hectares in 2015, has shrunk to just 1.13 lakh hectares this year — a nearly 66 per cent drop — largely due to repeated pest (whitefly and pink bollworm) attacks and volatile market prices. Maize, expected to be a pillar of diversification, has shown little progress with 1.26 lakh hectares in 2015-16 to just 95,560 hectares this season. Sugarcane has hovered between 90,000 to 95,000 hectares since 2015-16, without significant expansion. Basmati, though still a rice crop, is considered as an alternative to paddy due to its shorter growing cycle. It too has declined — from 7.63 lakh hectares in 2015-16 to 6.80 lakh hectares this year against 6.78 lakh hectares last year.
This shift toward paddy has profound implications for Punjab’s fragile groundwater resources. According to a 2017-18 report by the Central Ground Water Board, the state could face an agricultural crisis by 2039, when farmers may need to dig as deep as 1,000 feet to access water.
Renowned economist and agriculture expert Dr Sardara Singh Johal, who has long advocated for crop diversification, has been calling for the urgent need for a policy overhaul. He expressed several times that Punjab is facing a water emergency because of over-extraction of groundwater to support paddy.
With the upper aquifers drying up, this small state, which feeds the entire country, is getting trapped in a self-destructive cycle.
Experts said it will be difficult to reduce the area under paddy as long as free power is provided to the agricultural sector, and alternative crops are not supported with high-yielding seeds and assured MSP.
Jaswant Singh, director, Agriculture Department, Punjab, said that the department is trying its best to enhance areas under other crops and has seen an increase under cotton, maize and Basmati as compared to last year but at the same time the area under rice has also increased.
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