July 2020, South Asia 
Signs of farm ‘revolution’ in India as coronavirus prompts change
Mayank Bhardwaj and Naveen Thukral

For more than two decades, Indian farmer Ravindra Kajal cultivated rice the way his forefathers had – every June he flooded his fields with water before hiring an army of farmhands to plant paddy seedlings.

But a scarcity of workers this year because of the coronavirus forced Kajal to change. He irrigated the field just enough to moisten the soil and leased a drilling machine to directly sow seeds on his 9-acre (3.6-hectare) plot.

“Since I was more than comfortable with the tried-and-tested way of growing rice, I opted for the new method with some trepidation,” said Kajal, 46, looking over his field, green with rice saplings, in the Raipur Jattan village in Haryana state.

“But I’ve already saved around 7,500 rupees ($100) per acre because I hardly spent on water and workers this year,” he said.

India is the world’s biggest exporter of rice and the world’s second-biggest producer after China. Across the country’s grain bowl states of Haryana and neighbouring Punjab, thousands of farmers like Kajal have been forced by the coronavirus to mechanise planting.