Farmers Movement Archive

Nakodar's Bir Pind offers ‘powerful’ solution to straw menace

To all those farmers not convinced with the idea of in situ techniques of handling paddy straw, Bir Pind residents in Nakodar have a message: Give us the paddy straw and we will readily pay you Rs 1,350 per tonne for it.The village panchayat has been using stubble for power generation for the past few years. Using 250 tonnes of stubble to produce 6 MW daily, the panchayat says it needs more stubble to the keep the plant running round the year. Kewal Singh, who manages the plant, says: “We need 75,000 tonnes of stubble to run the plant throughout the year. But we do not get more than 30,000 tonnes of stubble.”Kewal Singh says he has even made videos to appeal to the farmers across the state to use balers in their fields, get bundles of the straw made and get the stubble dropped near their plant. “Even our district has 32 balers. While 20 baler machines were already there, 12 more have been bought by farmers under the 50 per cent subsidy scheme. This machine bales 20 to 25 acres of paddy straw in a day and one acre brings out 25 to 30 quintals of straw,” he says.Mandeep Singh, a Kangna village farmer, says he has been selling around 20,000 quintal paddy straw to the electricity generation plant at Bir village and getting Rs 135 per quintal after making bales of the straws.

The Tribune

2020-10-09

Jalandhar