The farmers preparing for the day Punjab runs out of water

Narinder Tiwana was a teenager when his father first used a light motor to draw out groundwater for their fields in Punjab’s Patiala district.

In a few years, however, the 3 horsepower motor pump was struggling. “So, we purchased a 5 hp motor,” the 51-year-old farmer from Dittupur village said. “When that motor failed, we bought a more powerful one.”

But over the years, the water table kept dropping. Today, Tiwana said he uses 20-25 hp motor pumps. “And yet we are struggling to get water,” he said. “Every year, the water goes down by three feet.”

His assessment is borne out by data. According to a study, the annual water table in Patiala, where rice is one of the two main crops, fell by around 188 % between 1996 and 2018.

Tiwana was looking for a way out of this crisis when he met Kahan Singh Pannu, a 64-year-old farmer who once served as secretary of agriculture for the Punjab government.

Since his retirement in 2020, Pannu has actively worked on innovative farming techniques on his own land and encouraged farmers to adopt them.

His evangelism is driven by a sense of urgency. “At this stage, we have to assume that there is no water left for cultivation in Punjab,” he said. “Only then can we save the future.”

An experiment with paddy

When Pannu asked Tiwana to experiment with a new technique of farming paddy, he decided “it would not hurt” if he tried it out on two acres of his 20 acre-land.

Tiwana did not flood the two acres with water and transplanted paddy saplings that had been grown in his nursery, a method that demands a large amount of water.

Instead, in June last year, he shaped the land into a row of narrow elevated soil beds, separated by deep furrows. The rice seeds were planted on the soil beds and the furrows filled with water.

“Only 50% of water is needed to grow rice this way as compared to traditional paddy farming,” said Tiwana.

At the time of harvest in October, Tiwana was not disappointed. “I got a yield of around 24 quintals on one acre, which is about the same with traditional methods,” he said.

Bahadur Singh, a farmer from Amloh village of Punjab’s Fatehgarh Sahib district, also benefited from moving to the less water-intensive technique. “A farmer incurs a cost of Rs 5,000 per acre to transplant rice saplings in puddled water,” he explained. “But in this method, the seeds are planted by a machine which costs less than Rs 1,000 per acre.”

As Punjab stares at the grim prospect of running out of water, farmers in the agrarian state are beginning to experiment with a handful of solutions, with support from scientists. However, scaling up remains an uphill task.

The crisis

Punjab comprises only 1.5% of the country’s geographical area, but is essential to India’s food security. One of the three states where the country’s policymakers introduced the transformative agricultural practices under the ‘Green Revolution’ in the 1960s, Punjab produces nearly 24% of the total rice and 49% of the total wheat produced in the country.

Since groundwater irrigates 71% of Punjab’s total agricultural land, continuous cultivation of water-intensive crops like paddy has adversely impacted the state’s groundwater resources.

Punjab grows rice on over 32 lakh hectares of its total 36 lakh hectares of agricultural land in kharif season, from June to October. Most farmers then sow wheat in the second agricultural season that extends from October-November to March-April.

According to a 2020 report by the Ministry of Jal Shakti’s Central Ground Water Board, Punjab’s surface groundwater – available at a depth of 100 metres – might vanish by 2029.

If the exploitation of groundwater resources continues, the availability could plunge below 300 metres by 2039. At that level, the groundwater water will be as good as useless as the extraction of the groundwater would become unaffordable and the quality of water would not be suitable for irrigation.

The signs are not encouraging. In October 2021, a joint central-state government report revealed that around 78% of Punjab's groundwater resource base is over-exploited.

Saving costs

Pannu, the former civil servant, has been aware of Punjab’s agricultural crisis throughout his career.

In 2009, as a bureaucrat, he drafted a law that prohibits farmers from sowing paddy seeds in nurseries in April at the height of summer and transplanting the seedlings before the arrival of monsoon, around June 10. That was able to bring down the requirement of water drastically.

“When I was in the administration, I tried to carry out some interventions at the policy level,” he said. “Over the years, they proved to be beneficial for saving the water.”

Pannu cultivates paddy on around 17 acres of land in Jai Nagar village of Patiala, using the technique of seeding rice on elevated beds that he hopes other farmers will take up soon.

In the last three years, around 60 farmers have tried this paddy growing method, called seeding of rice on beds, Pannu told Scroll.

But only large and medium landholding farmers have shown interest. “Marginal or small farmers always adopt a new technique once they are sure about it. Their risk-taking capacity is very less,” explained Pannu.

Though the technique has been recommended by Punjab’s premier agriculture research institute Punjab Agricultural University, scientists say that claims that it can bring down the water usage for paddy cultivation by 50 or 75 % is premature.

“It’s a big claim and needs a lot more research. But the fact is that the water required for irrigation under this method is relatively low,” said a scientist at Punjab Agricultural University, wishing to remain anonymous as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

A search for solutions

Dr Ajmer Singh Dhatt, director of research at Punjab Agricultural University, told Scroll that the institution recommends a host of solutions to bring down the use of water.

One of them is the direct seeding of rice. As with Pannu’s technique, this does not involve transplanting paddy seedlings from a nursery into a puddled field. Instead, rice seeds are sown directly into moist soil.

According to data from the university, in the first year of Covid-19 pandemic the area of paddy plantations that used direct seeding jumped from 5.4 lakh hectares to 6 lakh hectares. One reason was that it needs less labour.

“There was a lack of labourers owing to the lockdown. Therefore, the farmers adopted this method,” said Pannu.

Among those farmers who tried this on a patch of 5-6 acres was farmer Bahadur Singh’s father, Balbir Singh. “It needed less water but we faced a perpetual weed problem,” the 71-year-old farmer said.

Scientists at Punjab Agricultural University assert that the direct seeding of rice saves 10-20 % of water in comparison to the traditional method, but admitted that it leads to “the presence of weeds of diverse flora”, thereby restricting its adoption on a large scale.

Open to innovation

Agricultural experts say the alarming water crisis has led a section of Punjab’s farmers to become responsive to innovation.

Dhatt, the director of research at Punjab Agricultural University, said, “Punjab's farmers are very innovative. Whatever new techniques we develop, they test it and if it's performing better, they adopt it.”

Two years ago, for example, Balbir Singh moved to seeding rice on elevated beds – like Tiwana. “Not only is the need of water less, there is no problem of weeds eating up the crop,” he explained.

He told Scroll that he has been trying to shift to sustainable agricultural practices for years now and is open to experimentation. “On 23 acres of my land, I cultivate only those rice varieties which take only 120 days to grow and consume less water,” he said. “The lack of water here is a serious concern.”

Need intervention

For decades, experts have warned Punjab farmers of breaking out of the monoculture of wheat-paddy cultivation owing to the depleting water resources and increasing input costs.

However, the cycle is hard to break as paddy and wheat are among the only few crops for which the central government offers a minimum support price or MSP. “It’s not only the MSP but the mechanization and ease of cultivation of wheat and paddy [that make the crops attractive],” said Dhatt of Punjab Agricultural University.

The farmers are also responding to the high demand from the central government, because “a large volume of rice is being exported,” Dhatt said. With a global market share of 30-40 %, India's the world's largest exporter of rice.

“Even if a farmer decides to quit cultivating water-guzzling paddy and cultivates a less water-intensive crop, it will take at least three years for farmland to adapt to the new crop and produce optimum yield,” said Balwinder Singh, a small farmer in Sirhind city. “Who will support the farmer and his family for those three years?”

At the state level, the Punjab government has tried to incentivise innovative cultivation techniques which ostensibly require less water and input cost.

In 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party-led government announced a bonus of Rs 1,500 per acre to farmers who take up direct sowing of rice instead of transplantation and flooding methods that consume a lot of water. According to Pannu, a similar kind of intervention is needed for the seeding of rice on beds method. “Someone in the government needs to wake up,” he said.