Surinder Sud: Here come the laser land levelers

FARM VIEW

The equipment ensure flawlessly even surfaces and can enhance productivity by about 15 per cent

Land leveling, if done with precision, can work wonders. It helps save on costly farm inputs like water and fertilisers, improves crop stand, and enhances yield by as much as 15 per cent.

These facts are, indeed, not wholly novel. Most farmers know them and take pain to level their fields, even if they have to create leveled terraces like the steps of a staircase. But the traditional ways of doing so are not so efficient to create a totally even surface in all cases. However carefully done, some slope gradients and undulations are invariably left in fields.

To get over this lacuna, sophisticated land leveling equipment that utilise laser rays to ensure flawlessly even surfaces are now available. Many private entrepreneurs have imported these laser land levelers and are offering leveling services to farmers. They have, indeed, been guided into this business by scientists working under the Rice-Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (RWC), a globally-supported initiative aimed at improving crop yields in the predominantly rice- and wheat-growing tract. This initiative cuts across national boundaries and covers the entire Indo-Gangetic belt in the Indian sub-continent. It gets funding support from the Asian Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, besides several national and global developmental agencies.

Nearly 25 laser land leveling machines have already been imported and are in operation in northern states. The operators charge about Rs 350 an hour for laser land leveling. The cost to farmers comes, on an average, to around Rs 2,500 a hectare, depending on the land condition. Nearly 3,500 hectares, largely in western Uttar Pradesh and some in Haryana and Punjab, have been leveled with this technology, according to RWC's regional facilitator Raj Gupta.

Though this movement is being promoted by the RWC jointly with public sector institutions such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and state agricultural universities, the actual work is preferred to be outsourced to the private sector. This is because the leveling operation often requires continuous work for more than 12 hours, which only the private sector can put in.

Talking about the benefits of the technique, Gupta says, the saving of water alone comes to an average of 20 cm in kharif and about 5 cm in rabi. This enables farmers to save on the cost of running tubewells. The even spread of water that a precisely leveled surface ensures leads to better crop stand because of uniform moisture availability to plant roots all over the field. The fertiliser-use efficiency rises by around 5 per cent. This is because it cuts down the wastage of added nutrients that takes place in uneven lands due to either leaching in lower areas having excess moisture or underutilisation due to moisture inadequacy in the root zones in higher areas. The net result is about a 15 per cent gain in productivity with consequential higher income.

Gupta says that Pakistan has been far ahead in deploying the laser land leveling technology in its rice-wheat belt. About 80,000 hectares are reported to have been subjected to this treatment there. The cost-benefit ratio of laser land leveling has been estimated at a healthy 1:2.7 in Pakistan.

In India, the cost of the machine is deemed as a major constraint in the faster spread of this technology. The laser equipment costs between $300 and $900, depending upon the type and functions. "For Indian conditions, even the machines on the lower end of the price scale can do the job," says Gupta. But the hefty 33 per cent import duty makes even these units unaffordable for many. Gupta feels that the government should review the import duty as this is essentially a natural resource conservation technology that the country needs to promote.

Indeed, an indigenous laser land leveling equipment has now been designed by the Atomic Energy Commission at its Indore-based centre for advance technology. Its prototype has been passed on to a few companies for manufacturing it but none of them have yet actually done so possibly because they do not expect to recover the investment quickly. However, as the technology gets popular and the demand for the machines swell, they may reconsider their stand.