Perception, Adoption, and Realized Benefits of

Swarna-Sub1 in Eastern India

Takashi Yamano,* Maria Luz Malabayabas, and Architesh Panda

T. Yamano is a senior scientist and M. Malabayabas and A. Panda are assistant scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

STRASA has been established by IRRI and Africa Rice with a view to reduce poverty and to stabilize rice production in drought and flood plagued and poor soiled rainfed ecosystems in South Asia and Africa through the use of modern technology.

STRASA is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

STRESS TOLERANT RICE

FOR AFRICA AND SOUTH

ASIA

STRASA Economic Brief No. 3 (August 2013)

1. Introduction

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of floods in Eastern

India and is predicted to negatively affect rice farmers in the region as 80% of the rice-

growing area is rainfed and exposed to floods. The mostly poor farmers in the rainfed areas

face crop losses caused by flooding, which can have a devastating impact on their

livelihood, potentially exacerbating poverty in the region. The International Rice Research

Institute (IRRI) and its collaborators have developed a submergence-tolerant rice variety

Swarna-Sub1, whose seeds have been distributed to farmers in Eastern India since 2008

(see STRASA Economic Brief no. 1 and no. 2 for details on the development and

distribution of Swarna-Sub1 in India).

However, benefits from stress-tolerant rice varieties such as Swarna-Sub1 become visible

only under stress conditions. The limited visibility of these benefits may hinder the

diffusion of stress-tolerant rice varieties. The issue is essentially similar to the demand for

insurance against extreme events. The insurance literature points to the fact that insurance

purchases against these events remain low, leaving the majority of the people uninsured,

until misfortune occurs. It is important, therefore, for the public sector to intervene and

prepare people for such extreme events. To gain a better understanding of the adoption of

Swarna-Sub1, we conducted a panel survey, visiting the same households twice in 2012 in

eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Odisha. In 2011, widespread floods occurred in Odisha but

not in UP. We thus examined the changes in adoption rates of Swarna-Sub1 from 2011 to

2012 and in farmers’ perception of Swarna-Sub1 after the floods in 2011.

2. Data

The data we used in this report came from a two-visit panel survey conducted in April-June

and October-December in 2012. The surveys were conducted in six districts in UP and in

two districts in Odisha. The sample districts were chosen from a list of districts where four

local NGOs have distributed Swarna-Sub1 seeds. From the NGOs, we obtained lists of

villages and farmers who have received the seeds. From the village list, we randomly

selected 52 villages in UP and Odisha. In the 52 villages, we randomly selected

households, interviewing a total of 565 representative households twice (Table 1).1 In the

first visit, we asked sample households about their crop production in the 2011 kharif

season; in the second, we interviewed the same sample households after the 2012 planting

season and asked about their adoption and perception of Swarna-Sub1.

STRASA

Economic

Brief

No. 3

1The household data used in this report were collected by NEFORD, an NGO based in Lucknow,

and A.I.D., an NGO based in Bhubaneswar. We thank Dr. RK Singh, Dr. JK Roy, and staff at the two

NGOs for their excellent survey work.

Table 1. Sample households in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.

State

Sample

households (no.)

Households that

experienced

submergence in

2011 kharif (%)

Adoption of Swarna-Sub1 (%)

2011 2012

(A) (B) (C) (D)

Uttar Pradesh 377 6.9 29.7 29.1

Odisha 188 87.7 12.1 17.8

Total 565 35.8 23.2 24.9

As previously mentioned, widespread floods occurred in Odisha during the 2011 kharif,

with about 88% of the sample households in Odisha experiencing submergence at that

time. On the other hand, only 7% of the households in UP had submerged plots in the

same period. Indeed, there have not been major floods in UP since 2009. The 2009 floods

were widespread and caused severe damage to rice production in UP. Because of the

2009 floods, UP state agencies have increased their efforts to distribute Swarna-Sub1

seeds since 2010. As a result, we found the adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 (29.7%) to be

high in 2011 in UP (Table 1). However, this rate declined slightly to 29.1% in 2012, the

reason being the lack of widespread floods in the area since 2009. In contrast, adoption

rate increased from 12.1 to 17.8% in Odisha. We hypothesize that the increase in

adoption rate in Odisha is due to the bad experience farmers had when their fields were

submerged in 2011. We examine this hypothesis below. In addition to measuring the

impact of the 2011 floods on varietal adoption, we also measure the effect on the sample

households’ perception of the variety.

3. Perception of Swarna-Sub1 under submergence

To measure farmers’ perception of Swarna-Sub1, we asked respondents to evaluate five

statements about Swarna-Sub1 on a five-point Likert scale: Scale 1 indicates strong

disagreement, whereas scale 5 indicates strong agreement. The five statements are

presented in Table 2. We found that farmers in Odisha have higher scores than farmers in

UP, except for the last statement. First, Odisha farmers considered Swarna-Sub1 as

submergence-tolerant more than did UP farmers. This could be because the former have

experienced submergence in 2011 and have either directly seen or heard of Swarna-

Sub1’s good performance under submergence. The Odisha farmers and their neighbors

thought that Swarna-Sub1 is a good variety (statements 2 and 3).

However, they did not agree about the ease of adopting Swarna-Sub1. The field

interviews revealed that this difficulty is brought about by the limited availability of

Swarna-Sub1 seeds. Because the average adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 is still around

20% in the study areas, farmers may find it hard to obtain Swarna-Sub1 seeds from

Swarna-Sub1 growers. This difficulty is expected to ease as more seeds are disseminated.

Table 2: Farmers’ perception of Swarna-Sub1 in UP and Odisha.

Odisha UP Difference

(A) (B) (C)

1. Swarna-Sub1 is more submergence-tolerant than other

varieties. 3.80 3.50 +0.30

2. I think Swarna-Sub1 is a very good variety. 3.74 3.35 +0.39

3. Other farmers think Swarna-Sub1 is a good variety. 3.68 3.31 +0.37

4. It is easy to adopt Swarna-Sub1. 3.33 3.24 +0.09

5. Swarna-Sub1 tastes better than other varieties. 2.51 2.89 -0.38

Average score 3.41 3.26 +0.15

Perception index 0.21

(0.69)

-0.12

(0.87) +0.33**

Note: ** indicate the 1% significance level of the t test.

One potentially serious concern is the taste of the variety. Both Odisha and UP farmers gave

below-average scores, 2.5 and 2.9, respectively, although our preliminary analysis found no

difference in farmgate prices of Swarna-Sub1 and other rice varieties.

The five-scale scores provided interesting results, but they were difficult to analyze. We thus

created an index based on factor analysis. The mean value for the constructed Swarna-Sub1

perception index is set at zero. At the bottom of Table 2, we present the average scores of the

perception index: 0.21 among Odisha farmers and -0.12 among UP farmers. The t test

confirmed that the difference was statistically significant at the 1% level. Thus, farmers in

Odisha had a significantly better perception of Swarna-Sub1 than farmers in UP.

4. Adoption and perception after the floods

To investigate the impact of submergence on the adoption and perception of Swarna-Sub1

among the sample farmers, we stratified the samples by length of submergence in 2011 (Table

3). We found that adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 remained at 27.5% in both years when

farmers experienced no submergence in 2011. After the farmers experienced short-duration

submergence in 2011, adoption increased from 3.2% in 2011 to 16.1% in 2012. The increase

was large, a 13-percentage point increase, and statistically significant at the 5% level. When

farmers experienced medium-duration submergence, adoption rate increased from 19.3% in

2011 to 21.6% in 2012, although the difference was not statistically significant.

When submergence duration was longer than 15 days, adoption rate decreased from 36.4 to

27.3%. This may be attributed to the mistaken notion that Swarna-Sub1 could survive even

under stagnant water for a long time; farmers thus cultivated the crop in areas that were prone

to stagnant flooding. This was observed more in UP than in Odisha. After suffering from long-

duration submergence in 2011, farmers realized that Swarna-Sub1 was not suitable for areas

prone to stagnant water, and they switched to different rice varieties.

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INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Los Banos, Laguna, Philippines DAPO Box 7777 Metro Manila

For more information, please visit www.irri.org ; http://strasa.org

Copyright International Rice Research Institute 2013. This material is copyrighted to the International Rice Research Institute and is

Table 3: Swarna-Sub1 adoption and perception, by length of submergence, 2011.

Submergence length

Households

(no.)

Swarna-Sub1 adoption (%) Perception

index 2011 2012

(A) (B) (C) (D)

No submergence 298 27.5 27.5 -0.12

Short (1–7 days) 62 3.2 16.1** 0.08

Medium (8–14 days) 88 19.3 21.6 0.30

Long (15 days and above) 22 36.4 27.3 0.15

All 470 23.2 24.9 0.0

The perception index was high among households that experienced medium-duration

submergence in 2011, the average score being 0.30. The corresponding averages were -0.12

among farmers who did not experience submergence, 0.08 among farmers who experienced

short-duration submergence, and 0.15 among farmers who experienced long-duration

submergence. Table 3 suggests that adoption of Swarna-Sub1 is high among farmers who

experienced short- and medium-duration submergence in 2011 and that they have a good

perception of Swarna-Sub1.

5. Conclusion

In this report, we find that adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 increased in 2012 among farmers

who experienced submergence the previous year, and these same farmers had a good

perception of Swarna-Sub1. The results provide some policy implications. First, to improve

the effectiveness of dissemination efforts, it is important to promote Swarna-Sub1 when

farmers have a high demand for it—i.e., after their fields suffering from submergence.

However, this is obviously too late for farmers who suffered from submergence before they

adopted the variety. Second, to increase farmers’ awareness of the benefits of Swarna-Sub1,

the use of visual media may come in handy. It is common behavior to underestimate the

probability of undesirable events occurring, and this is true not only in India but also in other

countries. As a result, natural disasters such as floods cause a devastating impact on people

and communities that are not prepared for them. The public sector, therefore, has an

important role to play in helping people prepare for such events. Stress-tolerant rice varieties,

such as Swarna-Sub 1, can enable farmers implement measures to mitigate possible crop

losses caused by submergence, drought, or salinity.