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Falling yield in eastern states may force India to import rice

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

India, which was quite self sufficient in rice production over the past several years, may have to start importing rice by the year 2005, agricultural scientists said here on Tuesday.

Attending a three-day workshop on "Geo-Information Techniques for Understanding and Analysing Rain-fed Rice Environment in Eastern India", they expressed serious concern over the falling rice yield in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other parts of eastern India, which were major rice production areas.

"The yield in the rain-fed areas of this belt stood around 1.8 tonne, which was below the national average of about 2.7 tonnes and well below the four-tonne average of the well-irrigated Punjab and parts of Western UP," Dr R K Singh, programme coordinator of International Rice Research Institute pointed out.

In view of the major shift of farmers in the well-irrigated Western UP and Punjab to cash crops, there was urgent need for scientists to devise ways and techniques to increase the yield in rain-fed and even drought-prone areas. "That was the only way to meet the shortfall arising on account of the shift in crop," he said, while adding, "you see, all this while we have been concentrating our energies only on increasing the yield in the well-irrigated areas".

At present, India produces about 82 million tonnes of rice annually out of an area of 42 million hectares, of which as many as 19 million hectares were rain-fed.

Another scientist from Hazaribagh, Dr R P Singh, said, "We will have to develop flood- and drought-prone rice varieties, otherwise how are we going to meet the increasing demand of the country where rice is the staple diet of two-thirds of the population." He went on to add, "Besides developing varieties more resistant to pests, we will also have to improve the soil health."

Mention was made about two new varieties of rice that was specially being developed for the flood-prone and drought-prone areas. These were Jal-Lahiri and Jal-Nidhi, developed by Narendra Deva Agriculture University in Faizabad.

Scientists expressed hope that the constitution of Rice Environment Analysis Network, undertaken recently by the UP Remote Sensing Application Centre, Lucknow, would go a long way in applying the geo-information techniques for rice research work in eight states of UP, West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh.

UNI

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