Water and Energy Use Efficiency of Maize vis-à-vis Paddy Crop in Punjab Agriculture: A Move towards Crop Diversification

The present study examines the resource use efficiency of maize vis-à-vis paddy across various farm size categories in Punjab. In order to accomplish the objective of the study, primary data was collected from the sample of 100 farmers (40 small, 40 medium and 20 large) who cultivate maize as the main season crop (kharif crop) and grow paddy as well from 28 villages of two districts of Punjab namely Hoshiarpur and Roopnagar through multistage purposive sampling technique. The results showed that on an average 5 irrigations was applied to maize crop on the contrary 22 irrigations to paddy were applied in the study area, showed water-intensive nature of the crop, which resulted in the downfall f 5.7 m water level in the sample villages in the last decade. Though the per hectare net return of maize crop (27987.70) was less than that of paddy (38001.10) but if the irrigation cost of pumping out groundwater is included in the operational cost, the returns would have been decreased by 8.43 percent of maize crop and 23.44 percent for paddy crop from the existing net returns among the sample farmers. The Cobb Douglas production function was used to estimate the elasticity coefficients of different inputs determining the crop productivity. The results showed that, in maize only seed and in paddy, the plant protection, urea, DAP, and water-use were statistically significant having positive regression coefficients.