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Punjab was saved from incurring losses amounting to a whopping Rs 2,800 crore due to community nurseries or ‘nursery langars’, where free nurseries were provided to farmers for transplanting by their counterparts in Haryana as well as other donors within Punjab after floodwaters damaged lands across the state last year, a new study by the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, has said.
Although the farmers of Punjab still had to spend Rs 245 crore, the community nurseries nevertheless helped them equal the average rice yield achieved by the state in 2022.
“Hence it may be concluded that the additional expense of Rs 245 crore by farmers and PAU-led community nursery campaign helped the farmers to achieve equivalent state average rice yield as realized during the previous year 2022,” the study noted.
Large swathes of north and northwest India’s hills and plains including Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana were flooded during the southwest monsoon of 2023.
Floodwaters entered the plains of Punjab as soon as heavy rains started upstream in the hills of Himachal Pradesh on July 7, 2023.
“There was a breach in rivers/choes (Punjabi term for local seasonal watercourses) due to the down flow of rainwater from 8th July 2023 that caused inundation of fields in Punjab. All floodgates of the Bhakra (on the Satluj) and Pong (on the Beas) dams remained open for many days as heavy rains in catchment areas during July alarmingly increased the water level in the reservoirs. Hundreds of villages in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh located along the swollen Satluj and Beas rivers were inundated. The condition further worsened with the opening of floodgates of the dams,” the study noted.
The rainfall clearly bore the signature of human-induced climate change. Punjab received 20.9 and 43.3 per cent higher rainfall than normal during June and July. Himachal recorded 19.4 and 75.1 per cent higher rainfall than normal during these months.
“It indicated that the cause of floods in Punjab during July 2023 was the heavy rainfall in upstream areas in Himachal Pradesh in a short span of time,” the study highlighted.
The fields of Punjab, especially those along rivers like the Satluj and Beas in the state’s Doaba region (Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar), the Ghaggar in the Malwa region along the Haryana border to the south and along the Ravi in the Majha region’s Gurdaspur district to the north, bore the brunt as floodwaters inundated them.
“As per records, approximately 2.21 lakh ha of area was submerged due to floods in Punjab. Amongst the different districts in Punjab, the worst-hit districts were Patiala, Mohali, Tarn Taran, Gurdaspur and Fatehgarh Sahib. Overflowing Ghaggar, Beas, Sutlej and Ravi rivers entering the Punjab state from the upstream state of Himachal Pradesh, resulted in devastating impact in these districts. The intensity of inundation decreased with the distance from the floodplain areas of these rivers and their tributaries,” according to the study.
The 2.21 lakh ha area under paddy inundated by floodwaters is significant. Nearly 31.49 lakh ha (3.149 mha) of Punjab’s area is under paddy cultivation during the kharif season. The transplanting of paddy starts from June 15 onwards.
This means nearly seven per cent of the area under paddy in Punjab was inundated last year.
Besides paddy farmers, those growing other crops like vegetables, maize, sugarcane and cotton also suffered huge losses due to the flooding.
“These crops are very sensitive to water stagnation and adequate drainage facilities could not be provided in time. Fodder fields were inundated with flood water and fodder quality deteriorated due to the covering of fodder foliage with silt,” the paper read.
The floods in Punjab could have devastated its farmers.
Down To Earth’s Raju Sajwan and Aishwarya Iyer had reported from Ground Zero along the Punjab-Haryana border.
A unique initiative called community nursery or ‘Nursery Langar’ saved the flood-hit farmers of these areas.
‘Langar’ as a concept goes back to the last few years of the life of Guru Nanak Dev. The founder of Sikhism settled in Kartarpur Sahib on the banks of the Ravi (now in Pakistan) and founded a community which lived as per the principles he preached, the Three Pillars of Sikhism: Kirat Karo (Work hard), Vand Chakko (Share with the needy) and Naam Japo (Always remember God).
The Guru started the institution of Langar (free community kitchen), where everyone could eat alongside each other, regardless of the barriers of caste and religion.
In 2023, DTE chronicled ‘sapling solidarity’ as cultivators in flood-hit villages of Punjab and Haryana received a free supply of paddy saplings from their counterparts in safer areas to tide over the losses and avoid a crop-less rice season.
“Volunteers/entrepreneur/farmer groups were encouraged to raise the nursery and such places were geo-tagged. The mobile number of such nursery growers was made public through advertisements on various social handles and vernacular newspapers. Several awareness camps were arranged in different parts of the flooded area to make aware the farmers of the initiatives by the PAU and district administration. The KVKs and regional centers under the aegis of PAU came forward to help and assist such farmers who were raising CN demonstrating the technology and also distributing the nursery to needy and poor farmers free of cost. Such efforts motivated small and marginal farmers to re-plant SDV to compensate for the losses,” the PAU paper said.
Short-duration rice varieties like PR 126 and Pusa Basmati 1509 were recommended for transplanting.
“The recommended transplanting time of rice variety PR 126, is from 20th June to 15th July and so this variety was advocated for late transplantation under post-flooding conditions. The second alternative was the basmati rice variety Pusa Basmati 1509 as its recommended transplanting time is second fortnight of July,” according to the study.
Farmers still had to incur costs during the re-transplantation. These included additional labour cost (@Rs 8,750 per ha), diesel cost for re-puddling using their own tractor (@Rs 2,500 per ha) and weedicide re-application (Rs 1,000 per ha).
The total estimated additional expenditure came to Rs 245 crore.
Nevertheless, the strategy worked.
“In Punjab average rice yield was 6739 kg per ha. The lowest yield was 4771 kg per ha in Amritsar district and the highest was 8421 kg per ha in Malerkotla district. Hence there was an increase in state average yield of rice by 260 kg per ha, i.e 4% inspite of floods,” as per the authors.
The concentrated efforts of raising community nurseries are a successful case study to mitigate the adverse impact of floods. Hence “Community Nursery as a Contingent Plan” has a bigger role in addressing such climatic aberrations, they concluded.
