Journal of Community Mobilization and Sustainable Development

In Punjab, direct seeded rice (DSR) is an emerging rice establishment system, which is considered helpful to get rid of the constraints of the traditional manual transplanting method of rice establishment. The manual transplanting method is a water, labour and energy intensive method and thus, has been perceived as a big threat to the sustainability of the rice production system in Punjab. However, this is still the most prevalent method among the farmers as they are reluctant to adopt DSR technique due to their perceptions regarding the constraints of DSR methods. Therefore, a survey of randomly selected farmers of two major rice growing districts of Punjab (Barnala and Patiala) was conducted to understand the adoption of agronomic practices by the farmers under different rice establishment methods viz. dry DSR, tar wattar DSR, manual transplanting and mechanical transplanting. Similarly, data on the perception of farmers about the advantages and disadvantages of four paddy establishing techniques were also collected. It was observed from the study that the manual transplanted rice system is still the predominant method of rice establishment. The data revealed that the range of the number of irrigations in dry DSR and tar wattar DSR were 15-25 and 12-25, respectively as compared to the manual transplanting (20-35) and mechanical transplanting (25-32) methods. As per farmers’ perception regarding the advantage of different methods of rice establishment, water and diesel saving and less insect pest incidence were the major benefits of direct seeding technique while higher yield was perceived as the main benefit of transplanting method. Moreover, iron deficiency, need much care and weed problem are the major constraints of direct seeding methods while irrigation water requirement is the major problem in transplanting methods. In the mechanical transplanting method, the majority of farmers perceived that this method needs much precision.