Raghbir Singh Brar
Faridkot
Email:raghbirsinghbrar@gmail.com
The Punjab government, in a rough estimate, allegedly pays about Rs 10000 crore power bill to PSPCL annually to provide free power to the agriculture sector.But it has been provided to all the farmers of the state, without any rationale behind it.So big farmers, who have more than one power connections pocket major portion of this subsidy.
The small farmers, mostly, do not have more than one connection and some, even do not have any Agriculture Pumpset at all.
The scheme was initially launched by Rajinder kaur Bhattal, in 1996,who was then Punjab chief minister with a limit of seven acres.
But with more political ambitions, Prakash Singh Badal extended it to all the farmers in 1997.
Since then, no government has dared to loose farm sector votes by rationalising the scheme.If free power is extended to small farmers, upto 7 acres of land, then the subsidy may go to mostly deserving farmers and power bill may come down considerably.But now many big farmers,who own even more than 50 acres of land, have four to five connections drawing free power.
Small farmers mostly turned digging tube wells after 90ties when cotton crop repeatedly failed and they even had to spend a lot to get power connections.Last,about in 2008, Captain Amarinder Singh led government launched a scheme called OYT ( own your tubewell) for which the farmers had to bear all the costs of installations of lines etc.Since then, there may have been hardly any power connections provided by the government.
Earlier, when the green revolution had to be ushered in, the government provided the farmers free of cost power connections.
Free power leads to the sharp decline of subsoil water
The free power to agriculture has also led to the sharp decline of the subsoil water.It is provided about 8 hours for paddy season.Some of the farmers would transplant paddy very advance and adopted long duration varieties.Some even switch on tubewells in dry lands when it is not required.Some farmers did not bother to clean their agriculture channels for canal water and stopped using canal water because running a tubewell is very convenient to them.
Output is small against the depletion of subsoil water, installing very deep tubewells, using upto 25 HP submersible water pumps
If we compare the output or result of the free power, it is very small.The precious subsoil water went very low.Some blocks were declared dark zones.Out of 153 blocks,about 117 have been allegedly in dark zone where the groundwater has been overexploited.The farmers, as paddy offered them assured MSP and purchase, had to dig up very deep tubewells, spending lakhs of rupees and buying very high powered submersible pumps.
About 2500 litres of water is required to produce 1 kilogram of rice.Some ot ois between 2500 to 5000 litres on the basis of the quality of soil.
If the respective governments tried to divert this huge amount to promote crop diversification and free power had been rationalised, the results could be positive.
There is allegedly about Rs 1.2 lakh crore has been spent on free power in the last 26 years.
The state has nearly 14.16 lakh tubewells.
The PSPCL allegedly provides free power from its 5900 metered agricultural pumpset feeders.