2,550 Punjab and Haryana farmers receive India’s first soil-carbon payouts

More than 2,550 farmers in Punjab and Haryana have been paid for soil-carbon and avoided-emission credits, the first such farm-level disbursement in India under an international carbon standard. M. L. Jat, director general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, initiated the digital transfers at Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana. The pool is about ₹2.9 crore. Individual payments mostly fall between ₹3,000 and ₹15,000, according to Usha Barwale Zehr, executive director of Grow Indigo.

The credits come from Grow Indigo’s Aadi programme, started in 2019 with ICAR technical guidance. Grow Indigo is a joint venture of Mahyco and the US firm Indigo. Farmers in the first cohort used direct-seeded rice, reduced tillage and residue management between 2019 and 2022 instead of puddled transplanting and burning stubble. Those fields, about 30,000 acres, generated more than 50,000 credits issued under Verra methodology VM0042. Grow Indigo said it paid farmers from its own funds ahead of full sale of the credits, with a traceable digital trail.

Officials attached to the agriculture ministry said the same fields saved an estimated 45 billion litres of water and kept more than 200,000 tonnes of residue out of fires, avoiding about 1,000 tonnes of PM2.5. Direct seeding, the company says, can save about 1.4 million litres of water per hectare compared with transplanted paddy. Farmers who joined after 2022 are still in audit and will be paid in later cycles.

A payment of ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 is small next to a paddy season’s costs. It is not meant to replace the crop. It is meant to put a price on a practice that Punjab and Haryana have failed to spread by exhortation alone: keep the straw in the field, put less water on the rice, disturb the soil less. If the credit buyer is real and the next issuance is on time, the payment can become a habit. If the buyer is thin or the verification stalls, it will look like a one-off ceremony at PAU.

VM0042 is a Verra method for improved agricultural land management. Using it matters because Indian farm-carbon claims have often lived in brochures. A registry serial number is harder to invent. It is still possible to argue about baselines and about how much carbon actually stays in alluvial soils after three seasons. The honest position is that the first issuance is a measured slice of 30,000 acres, not a transformation of the two states.

Jat’s presence ties the payout to the public research system rather than only to a private venture. That helps farmers who distrust carbon markets. It also puts ICAR on the hook if later audits shrink the credit volumes. The next figure to publish is not another crore. It is how many of the 2,550 farmers keep the practices once the first transfer has landed, and how many post-2022 fields survive verification.