Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Sunday lauded the state Agriculture Department for promoting crop diversification with total 7.50 lakh acres of area shifted from paddy cultivation to alternate crops during Kharif-2019.
Notably, the area under non-basmati paddy during current kharif season was 57.27 lakh acres as compared to 64.lakh acres during Kharif-2018.
Lauding the efforts of the Agriculture Department, the Chief Minister, who also holds the Agriculture portfolio, said that this initiative would go a long way in conserving water as paddy is a water guzzling crop.
“The government aimed to shift seven lakh acres more area from paddy to cotton, maize, basmati and fruits and vegetables with a view to restoring water balance in the State.
The Agriculture Department had already shifted 7.5 lakh acres area from paddy to other crops this year which includes about three lakh acres under cotton, 1.27 lakh acres under maize, 2.95 lakh acres under basmati and 17,500 acres under fruits and vegetables,” he said.
Highlighting the major initiatives undertaken by the Agriculture Department during 2019, the state Additional Chief Secretary (Development) Viswajit Khanna said that in addition to crop diversification, the Department had also launched a vigorous campaign in Kharif-2019 to motivate farmers to reduce the use of agrochemicals, especially nine agrochemicals that have negative impact on Basmati grain quality.
“This has brought encouraging results as the chemical residue level in Basmati crop was found to be below minimum residue level (MRL),” he said.
Following this initiative, the state farmers had produced high quality basmati crop and got remunerative prices of their produce in spite of weak international sentiment owing to restrictions on export to
Iran, which is a major market for Punjab basmati.
To ensure judicious use of fertilizers, 24.30 lakh soil health cards have already been issued to the farmers after testing their soil health and the farmers were requested to apply need based fertilizers as per PAU recommendations, said the state Agriculture secretary KS Pannu.
Pointing to the drastic reduction in consumption of urea and DAP, Pannu said that the consumption of urea in Kharif-2019 was 13.75 lakh tons as compared to 14.57 lakh tons in 2018, thereby saving Rs 49.20 crore of farmers on this count.
Similarly, the consumption of Diammonium Phosphate (DAP) has also registered decrease of 33000 tons, which was 1.42 lakh tons during kharif-2019 as compared to 1.75 lakh tons in 2018, thus saving nearly Rs 82.50 crore of farmers during the current season.
Giving details of pesticides consumption during kharif-2019, Pannu said that the productivity of crops is crossing all previous records as a result of strict vigil on sale of spurious seeds and agrochemicals.
“The total usage of pesticides has registered a decline of 675 MT(technical grade) during the current Kharif season, thereby benefitting the farmers to the tune of Rs 355 crore.
The usage of pesticides was 3838 MT of pesticides worth Rs 2,000 crore during kharif-2018,” said Pannu.