Finally, over 24,000 farmers set to receive DSR incentive
After an inordinate delay of four months, the Punjab Government is all set to disburse the incentive to farmers who had opted for Direct Seeding of Rice (DSR) in their fields during the last kharif marketing season.
Over 24,000 farmers, who went in for the water-saving technique to sow the paddy in July 2024, will start getting the incentive of Rs 1,500 per acre under DSR, from the coming week. A sum of Rs 38 crore has been approved for the purpose.
“We will start to disburse the incentive into the accounts of the farmers from Tuesday onwards,” state Agriculture Minister Gurmeet Singh Khudian told The Tribune.
The state government has been drawing flak from farmers for the delay in releasing the incentive. The data for all farmers and the total land cultivated using the DSR technique was collated and sent for approval by the Directorate of Agriculture in October last year, but the money was not disbursed. Because of the delay in release of incentives, many farmers had been openly saying that they would rather not opt for the scheme in 2025-26 kharif season that begins in June this year.
The technique of sowing paddy, traditionally called “tar wattar ” was promoted by the Aam Aadmi Party government, right after it came to power in 2022. The government wanted to bring 10 lakh acres of area under the DSR, though it achieved to bring 1.69 lakh acres under direct seeding in the first year.
In 2023-24, the government managed to bring 1.72 lakh acres under the DSR, which increased to 2.53 lakh acres in 2024-25.
“The Agriculture Department had set a target for itself to bring 7 lakh acres under the DSR in 2023-24, and 5 lakh acres in 2024-25. The government has been lowering the target each year, mainly because farmers are not following the package of practices for watering paddy fields, that need to be adopted for the DSR, which is leading to the problem of weeds growing in the paddy fields. This, then forces the farmers to use additional weedicides, increasing their cost of production,” said a senior officer in the department.
New SRB method
Kahan Singh Pannu, a former IAS officer, has developed a new technique of paddy sowing, called Seeding of Rice on Beds (SRB). Based on field experiments, he claims this technique saves much more groundwater than the DSR technique. He recently presented the results of his field experiments at a national workshop held at International Rice Research Institute (South Asia), Varanasi. Under the SRB technique, paddy seed is directly sown on raised beds of 18-22 inch width and water is applied only in furrows of 12 inch width. Pannu told The Tribune that he got the paddy sown by using SRB technique on trial basis with farmers in different areas of Punjab, which gave yields equal to paddy grown by traditional method but with substantial cost, water and power saving .
