Punjab: Wait for paddy sowing 5-day longer this year

“There was a time when farmers could sow paddy any time after wheat harvesting by April-end. Most of the farmers used to sow it from June 1,” said farmer Ajmer Singh of Nugajja village in Jalandhar who wanted to sow paddy on his 10 acres from Friday, but couldn’t.

Another farmer Lachman Singh of Sarinh village, however, said officials told him that late sowing will save water. By delaying the paddy sowing by just five days, Punjab, the highest groundwater-exploited state in India, can save around 24 lakh million litres of water. The crop will now be sown close to the onset of monsoon, which is June 29-30 in Punjab, thus saving more groundwater.

But hundreds of farmers have been defying the government’s order for the past few days and some of them sowed paddy on Friday too (June 15).

One of them, Jagtar Singh of Madeh Ke village in Moga, transplanted paddy on 1.5 acres. As the information reached Agriculture department, officials arrived to disrupt the process by ploughing his land, but for Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ugrahan), they returned without damaging the field. “I have been sowing it on June 15 for the past four years and wanted to do the same this time, otherwise I will not get good yield,” said Jagtar.

Gurudwara Nanaksar Smadh Bhai village’s Sant Gurdev Singh, who sowed paddy on 10 acres on Friday, echoed him.

Till 2008, there was no official date as such. That year, the government had ordered the farmers to sow paddy on June 10. Then in 2014, government passed another notification under Punjab Preservation of Sub Soil Water Act, 2009, and decided June 15 as the official date of paddy sowing. This year in April, the government passed yet another notification delaying paddy sowing by five more days.

In the past decade, the government had changed three official dates of paddy sowing because the groundwater had drastically gone down in the state and the area for its cultivation had been increasing with every passing year.

BKU (Ugrahan) has been opposing the late sowing of paddy and hundreds of farmers affiliated to it had sown paddy on June 10 in over half dozen districts of Malwa region. At some places, even cases were registered against the farmers for defying the order.

General Secretary of Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ugrahan), Sukhdev Singh Kokrikalan, said late sowing will affect the crop badly because there will be more than 24 per cent moisture in it at the time of harvesting and then procurement agencies will not purchase the paddy or lower the rate. “Harvesting too will be late and farmers will hardly get time to manage the paddy stubble before wheat sowing. The right time to sow paddy is June 10,” said he, but could not convince why they were sowing paddy on June 15 for the past four years.

Kokrikalan said if saving water was the aim, farmers were ready to grow other less water-consuming crops, but the government must give assured price of those like paddy.

“We had informed the farmers six months in advance about the official date of the paddy, following which hundreds of meetings and camps were conducted at village-level to educate people about the reason of delay in sowing,” said Punjab Agriculture Director Jasbir Singh Bains. “When there is no water, what their future generations will do on the fields,” he said. “Instead of forcing the government, they should themselves refrain from early sowing.”

G S Mangat, senior rice breeder at PAU, Ludhiana, said that when the area under paddy is not decreasing they have invented short-duration varieties like PR-126, PR 127, which can be sown at the onset of the monsoon and even after. “These takes just 123 to 130 days, including nursery period, and are very high in yield too, while previous long duration varieties used to take 155 to 160 days, which the PAU does not recommend. Even PR 121 variety is very good which takes about 140 days, including 30 days of nursery period, and gives more than 30 quintals paddy per acre. These are are resistant to diseases. Now long-duration varieties have just 10 per cent area, while the short-duration ones can be harvested in the first week of October,” he said.