Congress MLA Rana Gurjeet Singh has written a letter to Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann expressing concern on the rapid depletion of groundwater with the potential of turning into a desert very fast.  In his letter, he said among many contributory factors, the role of paddy cultivation is the highest. Unless an alternative crop is proposed and incentivised, farmers in the State are not going to adopt so easily.

He said the cropping pattern in Punjab is alarmingly changing and even the Cotton cultivators in the Malwa region are also shifting to paddy cultivation  which besides upsetting the state’s diversification efforts will certainly have serious implications on the groundwater scenario as paddy is the water guzzler and the state is fast moving towards desertification. "The future appears even grimmer as the Central Ground Water Board has estimated that groundwater aquifers upto the depth of 600 ft. will run dry in the next 17- 20 years if the present pace of groundwater exploitation continues," he said in his letter.

He said the most disturbing fact of the declining area under cotton crop cultivation is that the majority of this area is being diverted to the paddy crop. An increase of area under paddy in one lakh hectares means that almost 40,000 agriculture pump sets shall be extracting double the volume of groundwater, which was required for cotton crops. 

"I would like to suggest that State’s Agriculture Department, Punjab Agricultural University and other allied departments/institutes should set up some demonstrative plots of ‘Monsoon Maize’ in an  area of approximately 5000 acres all across the state, in all three Majha, Malwa and Doaba regions at farmers’ level under the guidance of relevant experts. A compensatory allowance can also be set up for farmers accruing losses during these experiments," he said in his letter.