For more than a decade, Tejinder Singh Virk, a farmer in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district, had been planting paddy twice in the year.

First, in February, he would grow saplings in his nursery for about 25 days, before transplanting them to his 20-acre farm adjacent to it. He harvested this crop by May.

Then, around mid-June, just as the monsoon clouds began to gather over the state, he prepared for the next round of planting.

But since last year, Virk and other farmers in the district have stopped cultivating the first round of paddy – they did so after the district administration in January 2025 banned the crop’s cultivation between February 1 and April 30. This month, the administration reissued the ban for 2026.

The administration’s rationale for the ban was that the practice was draining too much water from the region’s water table. “In this dry season, the farmers depend heavily on tubewells to irrigate the crops,” the district’s collector Nitin Bhadauria told Scroll. “This has caused the groundwater levels to go down excessively, and the two paddy crops in one year are also reducing the soil productivity.”

Indeed, paddy, the region’s main crop, is highly water-intensive – of the 120 days of its cultivation, the crop needs to be in standing water for at least 80 days. According to the Central Ground Water Board, 43% of the total available groundwater for extraction in this district is used for irrigation.

Thus, the administration concluded that the cultivation of paddy, especially in the dry season, was affecting the water table – in fact, as far back as 2016, when the Central Ground Water Board assessed three of the seven blocks in the district, they found that the groundwater level in two of the blocks was “critical”.

Virk’s experience was consistent with this finding. “Around 2010, we only used artesian,” he said, referring to a type of well in which groundwater is available near the surface due to naturally existing pressure in underground rocks. In contrast to these are borewells and tubewells, which pump water from deep underground. Virk added, “Now, everyone uses borewells and tubewells, which have to now be dug at around 80-90 feet below the surface.”

Virk, who is also part of the Terai Kisan Sangh, said that many farmers were also concerned about the dipping water table, and were thus willing to abide by the ban.

He added, however, that farmers were hopeful that the government would support them in their efforts to diversify to other crops. “We have been discussing the need for diversification for a long time,” said Virk. “Some are moving to maize, but we are selling at lower prices in the market. The government should consider guaranteeing that it will buy the crop from us at the minimum support price.”

The effects of double-farming

The district of Udham Singh Nagar is a thin strip of plains that border Uttar Pradesh, and is part of the fertile, low-lying terai region. It is Uttarakhand’s largest paddy cultivating district, and produces nearly half of the state’s rice crop.

Farmers in the district noted that this “double-farming” of paddy is a fairly recent phenomenon that started around 15 years ago. They explained that it was primarily large farmers that followed the practice.

The move towards double-farming – specifically, the addition of the February cycle of cultivation – was influenced by several factors.

For one, the February crop proved to be more productive than the monsoon crop. Krishna Tiwari, a farmer and the district head of the Bhartiya Kisan Sangh, said that it produced between three and four quintals more per acre than the monsoon crop. “The summer crop also has fewer pests and diseases, so the costs of pesticides are also less,” he said.

But the additional crop had the effect of lowering the prices of the monsoon paddy. “Since rice millers buy the summer crop, they already have enough supply with them. So, they reduce the value of the monsoon crop and farmers end up selling it for less than the MSP,” said Jagdish Thakur, a farmer from Matkota village. Though the state had set a minimum support price of Rs 2,389 per quintal for paddy, he explained that farmers usually ended up selling their monsoon crop for between Rs 1,500 and Rs 1,700 per quintal.

Farmers also noted that the shift to growing paddy twice a year on the same land had reduced the soil’s productivity. To match previous years’ yields, they began to rely heavily on fertilisers and pesticides, which became an additional cost. “Our costing is increasing,” said Virk. “Earlier, we used to spend about Rs 10,000 per acre, now it has almost doubled, to Rs 18,000 to Rs 20,000.”

Further, farmers’ fears about the receding water table were underlined after they learnt that some farmers in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit and Bareilly had followed them and started to adopt the double-farming of paddy. Soon, however, farmer unions in those areas began to protest against the practice. “They started noticing that in tubewells near farms that were doing two crops of paddy, water was going lower,” said Thakur.

This reinforced the Uttarakhand farmers’ belief in the need for a ban, “If you look at it from the point of view of the farmer who was getting a better produce in the summer, this ban can seem like a loss,” Thakur said. “But in the long term, this is good for the water level and climate. If we have to continue farming, where will we get the water from?”

Diversifying to other crops

Bhadauria, the district collector, explained that the administration was encouraging farmers to shift to other crops. “We have been distributing sugarcane and maize seeds, both of which require less water than paddy,” he said. The aim was to ensure that there was “no adverse loss of livelihoods”, he added. Further, he noted, the administration had established links between the farmers and an ethanol factory in the region to whom they can sell their maize and sugarcane produce directly.

Some farmers have started following through on these initiatives. Since the ban last year, Tiwari has replaced between two and three acres of his summer paddy crop with sugarcane, and left some land fallow.

Compared to paddy, sugarcane requires less water, he noted. “For paddy, you have to ensure it is in standing water for 24 hours through its season,” he said. “But sugarcane requires water only in the summer months.”

He added, “At this point the income is less than what it used to be for paddy, but I am willing to try.”

Another crop that farmers are trying to grow is maize, which is less water-intensive than paddy. However, the crop has presented them with some challenges. If farmers grow it in March or later, the crop is ready to be harvested by May or June. This period sometimes sees rain – in such a situation, Tiwari said, “Farmers have no storage place to keep the ready crop.”

This problem also extends into the sale of the crop – Thakur explained that ethanol manufacturers are particular about the moisture content in the crop. “If it is more than what they need, they do not buy it, and we get a poor rate of Rs 1,200-1,300 instead of the usual price of Rs 2,300,” Thakur said. He added that some farmers had worked around the problem by planting the crop earlier, in February instead of March, and harvesting it before the monsoon period.

Experts noted that while both sugarcane and maize require less water than paddy, they are still fairly water intensive. Instead, they argued, more government support was essential to ensure farmers could cultivate significantly less water-intensive crops, like millets and oilseeds. “The government must assure them that they will buy such crops at minimum support prices,” said Vargish Bamola, a hydrogeologist with Himmontthan, a Dehradun-based organisation that works on agriculture and water in Uttarakhand.

Such support was particularly critical for smaller farmers who, Bamola noted, would be more affected by the ban – he recommended that the government provide them with cash incentives to move away from double-farming paddy.

Some farmers noted that action to protect the water table should not only focus on farmers, but also on industries in the region – this despite the fact that as government reports note, the industrial sector uses less than 10 % of the total extractable groundwater in the district. But farmers argue that their worries are centred on the pollution these industries may be causing. “These industries are not only using the groundwater, but are also releasing it back in a polluted form,” Virk said.

Indeed, government reports have noted that industries in the region have contributed to aquifer pollution by discharging “their untreated effluents directly to nearby water bodies”. One study that analysed samples from groundwater in the district found “anomalous values” of total dissolved solids, magnesium, iron and lead, which “confirms degradation in groundwater quality”.

In response to queries from Scroll on the problem of polluting industries, the district collector Bhaduria said, “We check water recycling plants continuously and make sure there is no pollution in that.” He added that the central pollution board and its state counterpart continuously monitor the quality of the released water. “We are focusing on ensuring that most industries get the best recycling technologies,” he added.

• We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in. *

• Uttarakhand
• Agriculture
• Water

Get the app