IAS turned farmer aims to check groundwater depletion

Time of India

4 days ago

Ludhiana: Amid growing concerns about the fast depleting groundwater due to paddy cultivation in Punjab, IAS officer-turned-farmer Kahan Singh Pannu has come up with a solution that uses only 20%-25% of water for farming instead.
He conducted a workshop on the technique, called seeding of rice on beds (SRB), at Ajeetval village here recently. He said it not only requires much less water, but also comparatively less quantities of weedicides and pesticides.
Pannu and his team are now creating awareness about the SRB technique in villages across the state to potentially curtail the groundwater crisis that looms large.
In fact, Pannu currently heads a programme for regenerative agriculture at RoundGlass Foundation.
Speaking to TOI, Pannu said, "The SRB technique is an improvement of the DSR technique. Bed seeding is a well-established practice in the cultivation of maize, potatoes and vegetables. Since it helps save a lot of water, I thought of trying it for paddy as well, but there was no existing machine for it. So I got a prototype made, experimented with it for about six months, and came up with a few iterations in collaboration with National Agro Industries for making seed rice beds.
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Last kharif season, he said, he used two such machines and it yielded great results in terms of saving water. Besides, it gave the same yield while using much less weedicides and pesticides. He has 12 such machines this year as they are trying to cover at least 100 places in the state.
Explaining the technique, he said 18-22 inch beds can be made with the machine, with grooves as wide as one foot. Two rows of seeds, 7 to 8 inches apart, get sown in the bed with plant-to-plant distance of about 4 to 6 inches.
This technique also saves labour costs as the machine sows the seeds directly.
Speaking about paddy cultivation, he said currently there is no alternative to paddy. Even though paddy is not a crop that is agro-economically conducive to Punjab, but the whole ecosystem depends on wheat-paddy with assured markets and MSP and farmers have experience of growing it. So the focus had to be on how to save water, as the groundwater in Punjab is depleting.
At the current pace, it won't last till 2039, as per the Central Groundwater Board statistics, he warned.
Short duration varieties were developed by PAU and DSR, but more was required. Currenly, 17 mn acre ft gets recharged but in Punjab 28 mn acre ft groundwater is being withdrawn. In the traditional method, the production of a kg of rice requires 4000 litres of water. In Punjab, paddy is grown on more than 85 lakh acres which means more than 15 lakh tubewells run from June to Sept, so one can imagine the magnitude of groundwater being withdrawn, he said.