System of Rice Intensification (SRI) for Mitigating the Risks of Climate Change: A Study of Three Settings from Tamil Nadu

Climate change is seen not only to reduce the number of rainy days and freshwater availability but also increase crop water requirement due to rising temperature. Therefore, cultivating paddy, which is a water guzzling crop, under the conventional inundation method is going to be very difficult venture for farmers in the future. The new method of paddy cultivation popularly known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) seems to be very useful to paddy cultivating farmers to overcome the issue of water scarcity arsing due to climate change. Though SRI has been in practice over the last few years in India, not many studies have attempted to find out as to whether SRI method of paddy cultivation will be useful to farmers to mitigate the risks of climate change covering different ecological settings namely tank, canal and groundwater irrigated areas. In this study, an attempt has been made to fill this gap using data collected from a total of 300 sample farmers from three different settings in Tamil Nadu state. The study shows that SRI farmers are able to save 34 per cent of water in canal irrigated setting, about 41 per cent in tank irrigated setting and about 45 per cent in groundwater irrigated setting as compared to non-SRI farmers. With substantial saving of water, SRI farmers were able to harvest about 46 per cent of higher productivity than non-SRI farmers; the highest productivity difference of about 51 per cent was observed in groundwater setting. Through saving of water, fertiliser and other inputs, about 23 per cent of reduction in the cost of cultivation were also realised by SRI farmers. Because of increased productivity and reduction in cost of cultivation, SRI farmers were able to generate an additional profit of Rs.17,169/acre over the profit earned by farmers cultivating paddy under conventional inundation method.