Punjab farming

June from May in an effort to save its groundwater — but the measure hasn’t paid off, experts say. The idea was that sowing ought to coincide with the monsoon season, which runs from June to September.

Since farmers have free power to draw groundwater, they don’t wait for rainy spells anyway. “On the other hand, harvests now have been pushed back by a month to November, a period when wind directions change and start blowing into Delhi from Punjab,” said Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of meteorology at Skymet, a weather forecasting firm.

Palawat said if Punjab were to go back to its earlier practice of sowing in May, it would greatly lessen the pollution problem. Harvesting could be wrapped up a month early in September, when wind directions won’t allow smoke from the state’s paddy leftovers to be blown into the national capital.

This is only a visible part of the damage. The transformation into a paddy powerhouse is worrisome for several other reasons too. Diminishing returns have set in, the Green Revolution has faded and the dangers of unsustainable paddy cultivation have begun to bite.

“The Green Revolution was actually a brown revolution. It was limited to rice and wheat,” said Uma Kapila, an economist who formerly taught at Delhi’s Miranda House.

Punjab’s rich landscape of corn, barley, gram, lentils and nutritious coarser cereals began disappearing fairly rapidly, within a decade of big cereals entering the state in the late1960s.

Skewed policy nudges are to blame. Over the years, agricultural universities and the Indian Councilofagriculturalresearch have developed five times as many high-yielding rice varieties than, say, lentils.

Research shows rice has not only been environmentally devastating, it has also put limits on the income potential of farmers and flattened the state’s farmgrowth curve. Average farm growth has plateaued around 2%, while it could have been clocking 5% annually if only farmers had not given up cultivating non-cereals, according to research by economists Ashok Gulati and Siraj Hussain of the think-tank ICRIER.

This means Punjab’s farmers are poorer now. The state’s agricultural gross domestic product (GDP), a broad measure of farm income, grew only 1.61% annually, less than half the all-india average of 3.5% between 2005-06 and 2014-15, their research shows.

The diminishing returns are clear from Punjab’s fall from high-farm growth rates of 5.7% achieved between 1971-72 and 1985-86.

Punjab’s farmers know only one mantra, says Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the state’s agricultural commissioner: “Paddy aur wheat lagaao, mandi mein le jao (Grow paddy and wheat; dump them straight into the markets).” With the government ready to procure, there’s no need to worry about buyers.

“At a psychological level, this policy has finished the enterprising ability of Punjab’s farmers. At a physical level, paddy has finished all our water and soil and agricultural chemicals have finished our health,” says Sandhu.

Wheat and rice, the two biggest grains, now account for twothirds of the state’s farm income from crops, thanks to steady minimum support prices (MSPS) and assured procurement by the government.

MSP is a floor price set by the government. The government then buys paddy and wheat at MSPS rates to build stockpiles for redistribution to the poor.

Cheap fertilisers, free electricity for drawing water and better seeds spurred a trend of ‘monocropping’, or the practice of growing just rice in summer and wheat in winter.

Punjab takes about 5,500 litres of water to grow one kg of rice, five times as much China needs, pointing to the state’s low water productivity. Northern and central districts are severely water depleted, while south-western districts face water logging and soil salinity or alkalinity. Grain bowls such as Muktsar, Fazilka, Bathinda and Faridkot are notoriously degraded.

The Central Ground Water Board put out a dire warning in May this year: at the current rate of water extraction, Punjab would be a desert within the next quarter century. Paddy has meant a groundwater extraction rate of 165%, a jump of 16 percentage points since 2013.

Hussain said free power is one of the main reasons for Punjab’s crisis. It doesn’t allow farmers to escape the pull of paddy.

“I have moved from shallow tubewells to six deep tubewells in my 12 acres. My expenses are going up because I have to dig deeper and deeper every year,” says Ravinder Uppal, a paddy grower in Sangrur.

Big cereals have stoked an insidious rise in costs, annually growing 5-6%, pushing farmers into debt, says Sandhu. According to a debt investment survey of the National Sample Survey Office, 40% of cultivators in Punjab are indebted. Average debt per rural household stands at ~64,548.

In fact, the increase in paddy support prices has barely kept pace with rising costs, if one includes the imputed rental value of land, depreciation and interests on capital, a cost yardstick known as “C2 costs”, Sandhu says.

Increasing the share of capital, such as harvesters and investment, is necessary for growth. But pumping more and more capital without routine technological advancements can lead to what Nobel winning economist Robert Solow demonstrated to be a “steady economic state”, where all new investment goes into replacing exhausted capital without productivity gains. The economy stalls, as a result.

Punjab’s agriculture is right in the middle of such a stagnation, as the Green Revolution has run its course. “Why else are 1.5 lakh people migrating abroad every year?” asks Sandhu. activity. The Union Cabinet also recently approved a previously announced scheme to revive stalled housing projects by providing debt financing to them from an alternative investment fund with an initial corpus of ~25,000 crore. Around 458,000 housing units are stuck, and the government believes that reviving them will provide a boost to the economy apart from relieving the economic and mental stress of homebuyers.

While reviewing the loan outreach programme on October 14 and banks’ plan for the second phase of the initiative, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman asked them to focus on MSMES in addition to home loans, vehicle loans, agriculture loans, education loans, and other personal loans. “It was reiterated that the outreach would be without any dilution in diligence or underwriting standards,” the finance ministry official cited above said.

In the review, it was emphasised that PSBS would continue to support non-banking finance companies (NBFCS) and housing finance companies (HFCS). Since the IL&FS default in September 2018 till October 10, 2019, PSBS sanctioned a total support of ~3.97 lakh crore in the form of credit as well as pool buyouts of ~1.07 lakh crore, including ~15,455 crore under the newly-launched partial credit guarantee scheme. no stay on the earlier judgment,” he added.

Senior lawyer Asha Unnithan agreed. “The Supreme Court did not stay the verdict. So it is binding on the government to go by it,” she said.

At Pambha, tens of thousands of male devotees, many of them barefoot and dressed in the traditional black clothes, readied in neat files for the 5-km trek through thick forests and streams for a glimpse of the deity Ayappa. Traditionalists in Kerala contend that the entry of female worshippers of childbearing age into the sanctum sanctorum in Sabarimala is a sacrilege because Ayyappa is celibate.

The orderly pilgrimage was a sharp contrast from scenes a year ago when violent clashes broke out almost daily between the police and enraged devotees, who slept in nearby shops and the steps and managed to stop women devotees for roughly three months after the SC verdict. Women pilgrims were regularly pelted with stones and at least one male devotee set himself on fire to protest against the entry of women of menstruating age.

On Saturday, many of those devotees appeared satisfied, and said peace was back at their favourite temple. “God is supreme. The highest court heard our cries for peace at the temple,” said Suramanyan Swami, a devotee from neighbouring Tamil Nadu’s Erode. A second devotee said he skipped last year’s pilgrimage fearing violence but that he was back this year with more “vigour and devotion”.

The chief priest or tantri of Sabarimala, Mahesh Kandarau, opened the temple doors at 5pm for the two-month Mandalamakaravilakku pilgrimage season. “In the first one hour, more than 10,000 pilgrims passed the police check post,” said a senior police officer.

After the 2018 SC judgment, the Left Front-ruled Kerala government had thrown its weight behind the women devotees and provided them security. But this time, the administration has appeared more evasive, with temple minister Kadakampally Surendran making it clear that the government won’t provide police cover to women devotees of menstruating age.

“Sabarimala was not a place for activists to display activism and the government will not encourage women who want to visit the shrine for publicity,” he said on Friday.

Hindu groups have already declared they will block any woman of childbearing age if they try to enter the temple. “We respect the government’s assurance. But, if they cheat us like last year, they will have to face repercussions,” said RV Babu, leader of the Sabarimala Karma Samiti, an apex body of Hindu outfits that has said hundreds of its volunteers are closely watching the pilgrimage route.