As does his land. His nine acres, on the outskirts of Dhuri town, now needs to be coaxed with ever increasing sackfuls of urea and phosphates and an assortment of pesticides and herbicides to yield a tolerable harvest of paddy, wheat and thuria (rapeseed).

But it's not this that worries Kaur Singh. What ``sits on his chest like a rock'' is the fear that one day his tube well will dry up. The authorities at Sangrur, the district headquarters, hold out no hope. ``The average water level in this district was at 1.5 to 10 metres in 1980. Today, it's 6 to 18 metres deep,'' reveals Bhupinder Singh Shahpuri, chief agricultural officer of the district.

Of Punjab's total geographical area of 5 million hectares (m ha), an estimated 0.8 m ha -- mostly in the southwest -- are water-logged. But the more serious problem isthe declining water table in 4.2 m ha.

``The Punjab farmer is literally mining his land for water,'' says Pramod Kumar, a Chandigarh-based social analyst. ``In fact he is robbing the future to pay for the present.''

Today, 95 per cent of the arable land is irrigated -- predominantly by tubewells. The free power and water that the Badal government so generously offered the farmers of the State only ensured that water is now being generously pumped out of the land without a thought for the future from the over nine lakh tubewells in the State. And to think, there were just 7,000 tubewells in '61!

It was paddy cultivation that brought with it an insatiable thirst for water. Although not rice consumers themselves, farmers here were quick to realise that rice was far more remunerative than traditional crops like maize. From 1950 to 1997, rice production leapt an unprecedented 70-fold -- from 0.11 to 7.3 million tonnes -- and the land under paddy cultivation ten-fold.

``Wheat we had always grown from timeimmemorial. But it's simple, paddy is more remunerative than maize, more marketable than soya bean,'' says Mastinder Singh, an agricultural development officer.

But experts say that paddy, in the long run, is an extremely costly crop given Punjab's relatively dry weather and soil conditions.

Captain Kanwaljit Singh, Punjab's agricultural minister paints a grim picture: ``Now, for five months in a year, Punjab is turned into a pond. This altered the climate and increased disease. Worse, farmers begin to transplant paddy in May, instead of June, to get two or three crops a year. This increases pests and requires even more tube well water since rains don't begin so early.''

While there are an increasing number of agricultural experts who feel that in 20 years Punjab just won't have the water to sustain such intensive cultivation of rice, the soil experts at Ludhiana's premier Punjab Agricultural University, advocate caution.

Says G S Hira, a senior soil physicist at the University, ``All high yieldingcrops take their toll on the soil and water resources. But we have to feed millions, never forget that. You can miss an onion, but you cannot do without a bowl of rice or a chapatti.''

Captain A S Randhawa, Punjab's director, agriculture, agrees that while changes in cropping patterns are in order, it must be done slowly. ``We cannot change the pattern followed in 33 lakh ha overnight. The current thinking is to divert to alternative high-yielding crops, like sunflower, vegetables and floriculture. But we have to start small, otherwise both the consumer and the farmer could be hit hard.''

In some pockets, the Green Revolution has begun to devour its own children. Sangrur district, where granaries creak under the weight of harvested grain and which produces the highest yields of wheat and paddy in the state, also registered one of the lowest literacy rates in the state and the highest number of suicides.

Most of them are marginal farmers, who get sucked into the sinking sands of credit that turns likemilk gone sour into debt.

As the road turns from Maler Kotla to Khanna town, Abdul Ghafoor stands in his tiny holding and crushes withered cotton pods between his palms. ``This is what five months of hard labour got me,'' he says, dusting his hands dismissively.

Just a kilometre away, there is a small outlet displaying packets of seed, and bottles of pesticide, carrying photographs of cotton pods bursting with rich fibre and cabbages fit for kings. They seem to mock at Abdul Ghafoor and his dream of harvesting 300 kilos of cotton from his seven-bigha plot.

(Tomorrow: New beginnings?)