Paddy in Punjab is normally raised in a nursery and transplanted by hand into a puddled, flooded field. Puddling destroys soil structure and standing water is where most of the irrigation goes.
Direct seeded rice drills the seed into a dry or moist field, like wheat, with no nursery, no puddling and no standing water. Water use falls by roughly fifteen to twenty-five per cent and labour requirement falls sharply.
The Punjab government has promoted it with incentives, particularly since 2020 when migrant labour for transplanting was unavailable.
Adoption has fluctuated. The problems are weed control, which is much harder without standing water and needs herbicides that themselves have problems, iron deficiency on some soils, and yield that is comparable in a good year and lower in a bad one.
A farmer will not take a yield risk on a crop that is his entire income to save water that costs him nothing. That is the whole of why DSR has not taken over, and it is a policy design problem rather than a farmer problem.
The window is narrow. The seed has to go in before the monsoon and the field has to hold moisture at the right depth, which means the sowing date is set by the weather rather than by the farmer, and a wrong week costs the stand.
It also removes the labour bottleneck and the three week window, and with them the compressed harvest that produces the stubble burning.
The university recommends it on medium and heavy soils and not on light ones, which rules out a good part of the Malwa where the water problem is worst. The technique that would save the most water is least suited to the districts that need it most.