Cotton acreage falls short of target by 90K hectares in Haryana

Sushil Manav
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, June 17

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The acreage of cotton in Haryana has fallen short of target by over 90,000 hectares this year because of hampering of field activities of the Agriculture Department during the second wave of the Covid pandemic and shifting of farmers to other crops like groundnuts.

The acreage of cotton has not only fallen short of the department’s targets as well as the last year’s area under the crop, but it is also less than the normal traditional area under cotton in the state.

With the cotton sowing season almost over now, the crop has been sown on 6.72 lakh hectares in Haryana as on Monday against the target of 7.62 lakh hectares set by the state’s Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Department.

The crop was sown on 7.31 lakh hectares last year while the normal (traditional) area under cotton in Haryana is 6.82 lakh hectares, according to government records.

Among the districts that have fallen well short of the target are Sirsa, where the crop was sown on 1.93 lakh hectares against target of 2.1 lakh hectares; Fatehabad 63,320 hectares against 75,000 hectares; Bhiwani 78,130 hectares against 1.05 lakh hectares; Palwal 19,000 hectares against a target of 30,000 hectares and Mahendragarh where the crop has been sown on 16,970 hectares against a target of 18,000 hectares.

Suresh Kumar Gahlwat, Additional Director, Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Haryana, said that the department had a plan to encourage farmers to diversify from paddy to cotton in a big way and the target was set keeping that in mind.

However, the second wave of the pandemic hampered the field activities of the department, he added.

Gahlwat also listed some other factors like many farmers in Palwal shifting to pulses and others near the Rajasthan border in Sirsa and Fatehabad opting for groundnuts following announcement of MSP of the crop by the government this year.

He further said that farmers in Bhiwani and Mahendragarh had poor yield of cotton last year because of whitefly, wilting of crops and nutrient deficiency caused by rain, which also made many farmers not grow cotton this time.

Gurjeet Singh Mann, a progressive farmer from Kirpal Patti village of Sirsa, however, said diversification to groundnuts cannot be a major factor in Sirsa and Fatehabad since farmers never go for such trials at such a large scale.

He said though the yield of the crop was not up to people’s expectations last year, farmers got nice return of their produce due to better prices.

He said though he was not into cotton farming, he had thought of sowing the crop this year looking at the prices last year.

“However, I changed my mind at the last minute because it is never easy for farmers to take risk by diversifying to a crop they have never sown earlier,” he said.