CHANDIGARH, 26 June — The banned high-yielding paddy variety PUSA-44 is quietly making its way back into Punjab’s fields, bypassing state regulations through social media-facilitated sales and farmer-to-farmer smuggling across the Haryana border, raising fresh alarms about the state’s deepening water crisis.
Despite the state government’s ban on the long-duration, water-intensive variety, PUSA-44 continues to be cultivated across nearly 15 per cent of Punjab’s total paddy area, agricultural experts say. The variety, originally popular for its productivity, requires around 160 days to mature and consumes up to 40 per cent more water than short-duration strains — a fact that has policymakers and environmentalists worried.
“PUSA-44 is still being planted in several districts including Patiala, Sangrur, Barnala, Ludhiana, Mansa, and Moga,” said Jaskaran Singh, a farmer from Nabha, who claims that saplings are being brought in from villages just across the Haryana border. “Many farmers are openly buying and selling the variety on social media.”
According to officials, these exchanges have largely bypassed regulatory channels, undermining the state’s water conservation policies. “Farmers in Haryana are promoting the sale of these banned varieties on social media, and these are being smuggled into Punjab,” confirmed a senior officer in the Agriculture Department.
Yet Patiala’s Chief Agriculture Officer Jaswinder Singh maintained that the spread is limited. “We have largely managed to plug the supply of hybrid seeds,” he said. “The sowing window for long-duration varieties like PUSA-44 has already passed. Some farmers might still be using old stocks, but the scale is marginal.”
However, the Agriculture Department acknowledged that its recent policy to advance the paddy sowing season might have had unintended effects. A senior official admitted, “Our aim was to ensure early harvesting by mid-September to conserve water, but this seems to have encouraged many farmers to fall back on long-duration varieties like PUSA-44, which defeats the very objective.”
The concern was echoed by agricultural experts and former Punjab Agricultural University vice-chancellors, including SS Johl, BS Dhillon and KS Aulakh. They had previously warned that shifting sowing timelines without strict enforcement could push cultivators toward high water-use varieties.
The stakes are high. According to the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), producing just one kilogram of rice in Punjab consumes around 3,367 litres of water — a figure that has deepened concerns amid the state’s declining water table.
As of June 24, paddy had been sown across 15.24 lakh hectares in Punjab, more than double the 7.47 lakh hectares recorded at the same time last year. Responding to the alarming trend, Director (Agriculture) Jaswant Singh held a high-level meeting with field officers in Chandigarh, directing them to submit detailed district-wise reports on suspected cultivation of long-duration paddy.
“This is a crisis we cannot ignore,” said an official who attended the meeting. “If we don’t check it now, the damage to Punjab’s groundwater will be irreversible.”
