Name : Surjeet Singh
District & State : Karnal, Haryana
Category : Agricultural (General)
Award : National
Award Function : 8th National Grassroots Innovation Awards
Award Year : 2015
Innovator Profile
Innovation Description
Salient Features
Scout: Ranjay K Singh
Surjeet Singh (62) is an innovative farmer who has developed a salt tolerant, high yielding paddy variety having long grain size through selection method.
Background
Surjeet Singh’s district is well known for producing high quality aromatic basmati rice. Owning about eighteen acre of land with good irrigation facilities, he has been practicing agriculture for over four decades now. He is a farmer well-known in his region for his agricultural pursuits. Surjeet wanted to complete his graduation in arts but got attracted to agriculture and dropped out. His wife and their two sons have been supporting him in agriculture. The family owns modern agricultural tools and machineries and also have a cattle herd. Behind his home, he has leased a pond for pisciculture. With the help of the government subsidy, he has also installed a bio gas plant, which produces enough gas for their daily cooking requirements.
Genesis
Surjeet Singh has been growing wheat, rice, pea, mustard, potato, gram, chilli and tomato in his agricultural land. In 2008, he sowed the paddy variety Pusa 1460 in his field but due to sheath blight disease all plants got severely affected except one. He harvested the plant separately and prepared a nursery in 2009, which was then transplanted in the main field. During harvesting he selected 225 plants based on the number of tillers, lengthy spikes and resistance to foot-rot disease (Bakanae rog), a major disease of basmati rice. The selection continued for another two years and the desirable characteristics slowly got stabled. The variety was named as Surjeet Basmati-1. He distributed the variety to ten farmers in Karnal district who appreciated it and mentioned that it performed well under saline and less fertile soil conditions.
http://nif.org.in/innovation/surjeet-basmati-1–high-yielding-and-salt-tolerant-paddy-variety/790