In the rain shadow

Jaswinder Sangha has been living in Jandusingha for the last 45 years. Rains have been delayed in the past too but things have never been so bad, he says. Sangha,the most prosperous man in the village,gets a steady stream of visitors through the day. They know Sangha has a computer with an Internet connection and request him to check weather updates. Checking his sleek Blackberry,he tells everyone the rains are expected tomorrow. It is an assurance more than anything else. Maybe it is wishful thinking, he says.

But in Jandusingha,tomorrow never comes. Each day is as dry as the previous one. With a delay of more than two weeks for the rains,the entire rice crop of the village is threatened. Villagers are used to errant rains but this time their dependence on the monsoon is higher because of a government order that barred kharif cultivation in the state before June 10. Aimed at checking the depleting groundwater table in the state,the order seems to have added to farmers worries. Since the government order drastically reduced the time between sowing and harvest,there is little margin for error. The rice crop has to remain submerged in water for long,shortly after sowing. The crop was sown in the second week of June but with the monsoon playing hard to get,Punjab,which is a major contributor to the countrys national food pool.

Rains keep the soil moist. So the water from the tubewell doesnt seep through. But look at the soil today. The water I put is gone within hours, says farmer Gurnam Singh,pointing to the deep crevices in the field. Rice crop has to be submerged in water for long hours. We have no option but to overuse our tubewells. Last year,the hole we had bored to extract water was only five feet deep. This year,we have already reached 15 feet.

But water table isnt the only thing thats going down in the village. Ambition and aspiration are on their way down too. Take the case of Inderjit Singh,a handsome 18-year-old. With his clean cut looks,Singh looks out of place sweating it out in a rice field. I just passed my high school. I have a way with gadgets and had planned to go to town to do some polytechnic course. But we are poor and this year,it seems like there will be a drought. Ill have no money to spare to study in the city. After helping my father in the fields,I work with a local landlord as a driver.

Inderjits younger brother Jaspal always wanted to go abroad. Now his desire has gained urgency. He sees it as the only way to earn and help his family. Then there is Paramjit Singh who returned from the UAE only six months ago but now wants to go back. He had gone abroad ten years ago to help his family pay off their debts. This year,he returned to his village,built a small house and bought land and some equipment on loan and started farming. But the truant rains have ruined his plans. With loans mounting,Paramjit has started doing the rounds of travel agents in Jalandhar again. My family is condemned to a life of debt, he says.

The failure of rains has highlighted the failure of several other things. Canal irrigation,for instance. Poor rains mean that the rivers are dry and the lone canal that passes through the village is parched. The century-old canal cant store water since it suffers from seepage. One canal has been dug under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme NREGS but since it doesnt have a concrete base,it cant hold any water. The job scheme itself has limited appeal in the village,with only 20 people enrolled under it. A nodal officer,who didnt want to be named,explains,The nature of works that can be taken up under NREGS doesnt help much. We can construct kaccha roads,dig ponds,do levelling of uneven grounds,but these projects are irrelevant in Punjab. Also,the wage rate of Rs 123 a day under the scheme doesnt attract many people when the normal daily wage is Rs 150.

With no water storage system,the tubewell is the farmers lifeline. Narender Singh is reluctant to talk. He has taken a generator from a rich farmer on rent to irrigate his rice crop. The voltage fluctuation is so bad that the motor of my submersible pump stopped working. It will cost Rs 3,500 to repair it. I dont have that money right now. So I had to borrow the money as well as a generator. But I still have to pay for diesel. One acre of rice cultivation gives me a return of Rs 15,000. I own only three acres. So if we dont get rains and I am forced to run this generator for the next four days,I will not make any profit, he says.

The village has one petrol pump and its owner Ranvir Singh Tut says demand for diesel has gone up by 30 per cent in the last fifteen days. I am selling 800 litres of diesel every day.

In the village,children can be seen ferrying jerrycans of diesel from petrol pumps to their fathers in the fields. Their mothers,meanwhile,are busy appealing to the gods for rain. There are regular prayer sessions. Superstitions thrive during such times and it is not unusual to find women organising mock weddings between two dolls, says Manjit Kaur,a member of the village panchayat.

So why do farmers stick to a water intensive crop like rice? Sangha,the rainspotter with the Internet connection,explains: Ninety per cent of farmers in the village have a landholding size of less than three acres. It is all very fine for experts to suggest that we initiate horticulture or grow fruits like it is done in Florida in the US or Brazil. But there,cultivation is done on vast swathes of land with modern equipment and most importantly with corporate support. All this ensures that farmers get their due compensation. None of this exists in our village or in any village in Punjab.

Interestingly,three years ago,Reliance had planned an ambitious farm-to-fork project in Punjab,where it would assist farmers to grow vegetables for them,thereby ensuring returns and facilitating diversification. But the scheme never moved beyond the planning board. Sodhi Singh,a farmer with a two-acre holding,talks of a closed Reliance Fresh store,some 5 five km away from the village. They told us that we would be asked to grow tomatoes but they never came back. At least by growing rice,we are certain of a minimum support price, he says.

But this time,that certainty too is threatened. No rain would mean no rice and no minimum support price. Sodhi looks longingly at the sky. There is no trace of a cloud,but he says,

Today the breeze is blowing from east to west. Usually this is a precursor to rain.

Punjab in Numbers

amp;149; Area: 5.04 million hectares m ha

amp;149; Net sown area: 4.2 m ha

amp;149; Total cropped area: 7.9 m ha

amp;149; Irrigated area: 4.04 m ha 97.4

amp;149; Tubewell-irrigated land: 2.92 m ha 73 through 11.68 lakh tubewells,which need power/electricity to run

amp;149; Canals irrigated: 1.10 m ha 27

amp;149; Cropping intensity: 189

amp;149; Area under paddy last season 2008-2009: 2.74 m ha,production: 11.02 m MT

amp;149; Rice productivity: 4020 kg/hectare

amp;149; Contributes 40-50 of rice to the Central pool