NCIPM director, SN Puri told The Financial Express that village Ashta represents the identical cotton growing situations of 11 districts in Maharashtra and 4 districts of Andhra Pradesh. He said that effective use of this IPM can stop the indiscriminate damage being done to the crop by the pests which are turned resistant due to frequent use of chemical pesticides and insecticides.

The use of this module can ensure less damage to crops and ultimately prevent any such situation leading to suicide by farmers, he claimed.Puri said that in this field trial attention was paid not only to IPM but also to successful raising of crop by critically analysing the gaps during 1997 season andcorrecting them during 1998. Some of the important crop production interventions made during 1998 included selection of only one hybrid NHH-44 and a variety Renuka for cultivation instead of 10-12 different varieties and hybrids which were commonly grown in this village earlier.

The certified seeds of cotton hybrid and a variety were treated with insecticide imidachloprid at the rate of 7 gm technical material per kg of seed. Generally the sowing in this village was staggered over a period of one month but in this project maximum number of farmers could complete their sowing from June 21 to 27, immediately after receipt of monsoon rains.The basal doze of NPK fertiliser as recommended by research institutions are generally delayed by the farmers and many a times applied after one month of sowing. However, this project could educate the farmers to make the application of basal doze of fertiliser before sowing. The farmers in this area were adopting varied spacings generally wider one, thereby reducing theplant population per unit area. The farmers were, therefore, educated about the importance of plant population in cotton crop and only recommended spacings were followed, he said.Maize crop is known to enhance the population of natural enemies to pests and so also cowpea. Therefore, all farmers provided a border row of maize crop around their cotton field. In between two maize plants, a plant of cowpea was also planted. In order to attract birds like black drongo and other species known to reduce larval population of bollworms by way of predation, a line of setaria was planted between every 9th and 10th row of cotton.

Puri said that in order to get the correct idea about the incidence of pests a regular monitoring was carried out by the scouts. About 50 pheromone traps were set for this purpose over an area of 500 acre. Immediately after noticing the incidence of helicoverpa moths in the pheromone traps two releases of egg parasitoid trichogramma at the rate of 1,50,000 per hectre land were made at aninterval of 15 days. To manage the population of bollworms like spotted and helicoverpa 2 to 3 applications of home made 5 per cent meen seed extract were made.

When the incidence of helicoverpa still kept on increasing one application of eco-friendly biopesticide, HaNPV was made at the rate of 250 LE per hectre. This combined package of integrated crop production and integrated pest management could give satisfactory control of different cotton pests to all farmers in this village. The farmers could harvest more than 1,000 kg per hectre seed cotton yield during 1998 season. Puri stated that this could be possible because of an effective transmission of IPM technology. The farmers' field school was organised regularly for cotton growers, where farmers were educated about the pests and their natural enemies through slides and pictures and their actual occurance n fields.

The cooperation of the scientific institution like NCIPM, Maharashtra Agriculture University, Parbhani, the gram panchayat and allfarmers could demonstrate that if collective efforts are made, it could be possible to raise the yield level of cotton from 145 kg per hectre to 300 kg per hectre. By this technique, the farmers will have to spend only Rs 1550 per hectre on IPM inputs which works out much less as compared to the use of chemicals alone.

The most interesting achievement of the project had been the significant reduction in the use of chemicals which was almost to the tune of more than 1200 kg technical material in earlier years and has been brought down to the level of 7 kg during 1998. This made a considerable impact on the environment also.