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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Sustainable Agriculture: Punjab's search for a less water-guzzling, yet high-yielding paddy -Divya Goyal & Harish Damodaran

Sustainable Agriculture: Punjab's search for a less water-guzzling, yet high-yielding paddy -Divya Goyal & Harish Damodaran

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published Published on Mar 30, 2017   modified Modified on Mar 30, 2017
-The Indian Express

A new 125-day rice variety promises to provide some respite to Punjab farmers, depleting aquifers

Ludhiana:
A new variety maturing within 125 days, yet yielding nearly as much as those now grown over 135-160 days, could provide the ultimate solution to Punjab’s woes stemming from farming of water-guzzling paddy.

Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) has released a paddy variety PR-126 that gives an average of 30 quintals per acre. This is only marginally below the 30.5 quintals from PR-121 and PR-124 or the 32 quintals of the other popular variety Pusa-44.

But the real difference is in the duration, from the time of sowing seeds in the paddy nursery to harvesting of the ripened grain. This ranges from 135 days for PR-124 and 140 days for PR-121 to 160 days in the case of Pusa-44. PR-126 matures in just 123-125 days, including 30 days of nursery raising and 93-95 days after transplantation of seedlings.

“The average yield per day from the new variety, at about 24 kg per acre, is more than the 20 kg of Pusa-44 or 22 kg for PR-121 and PR-124. The shorter duration also means less water consumption. If farmers have to give, say, 26 irrigations for Pusa-44, this would be only 21-22 in PR-121/PR-124 and 17-18 in PR-126,” claims G S Mangat, head of PAU’s rice improvement programme.

PR-121 and PR-124 were released for commercial cultivation in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The PR-126 variety was officially released for planting in the coming 2017 kharif season at last week’s PAU Kisan Mela here. “Last year, about 400 quintals of seeds was made available on trial basis to select farmers. This time, we are distributing another 1,000 quintals. At 8 kg planting per acre, it will again cover only a limited area,” adds Mangat.

PR-121 has, within a span of three years, become Punjab’s most widely-cultivated paddy variety. Last year, it covered over 7.7 lakh hectares (lh) or 30.7 per cent of the state’s total non-basmati paddy area, with PR-124 accounting for another 9.8 per cent. In the process, Pusa-44’s share, which was 39 per cent in 2012, fell to 20.3 per cent.

“We have not recommended cultivation of Pusa-44 (developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi) in Punjab mainly due to its long duration. The nursery sowing has to be before April last week and transplanting by mid-May, to enable harvesting from October and timely planting of the next wheat crop. The water requirement will obviously be high during this peak summer period. Secondly, Pusa-44 is susceptible to bacterial blight. There is no chemical control available against the Xanthomonas oryzae pathogen causing this disease that can result in significant grain yield loss,” explains Mangat.

Released in 1993, Pusa-44’s main attraction was its yields. At 32 quintals per quintal, this exceeded the average 26 quintals of PR-106, a 145-day PAU variety that was till then Punjab’s workhorse paddy following its introduction in 1976. Being a medium-slender (‘fine’) grain giving higher head rice recovery than PR-106, which produced long-slender or ‘superfine’ grains, also made Pusa-44 a favourite with millers. The Union government’s decision merging ‘fine’ and ‘superfine’ paddy into a single Grade ‘A’ category from October 1997 — entitling Pusa-44 to the same minimum support price (MSP) as PR-106 — further tilted the advantage in favour of the former.

The last straw came from the Punjab government’s policy of supplying free power to farmers. “When water could be freely pumped out to allow transplanting even in May, the farmer had reason to grow a long-duration variety that gave him extra yield. But it came at the cost of the state’s water table,” points out Satinder Singh Brar, a retired senior extension specialist with PAU, who has advocated a ban on Pusa-44 cultivation.

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The Indian Express, 30 March, 2017, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/sustainable-agriculture-punjabs-search-for-a-less-water-guzzling-yet-high-yielding-paddy-4591689/


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