Jalandhar, Oct. 31 -- What began four years ago on his own family holding in Charhake village has grown into a large-scale rural enterprise. Farmer-turned-entrepreneur Gurpreet Singh Atwal, 43, now manages paddy residue across more than 40 villages in Jalandhar and Kapurthala districts, turning crop waste into a commercial biofuel trade. Operating a fleet of 20 balers, Atwal aims to aggregate 25,000 tonnes of paddy straw during this harvest season alone. Atwal said the state provides a 50% subsidy on the purchase of a baler, which costs around Rs.11 lakh after the subsidy. "Initially, I started baling straw on my own land and supplying it to local stockyards," Atwal says. "As word spread, farmers from neighbouring villages asked us to evacuate stubble from their fields. We clear their land free of cost, saving them the heavy operational expense of running their own machinery." The farmers save around Rs.4,500-Rs.5,000 per acre on diesel and machinery rental through this free service. Atwal's operation feeds into Hoshiarpur-based Rana Enterprises, which maintains major straw stockyards at Bajajan in Kapurthala, Manjeki and Mawauna in Jalandhar, Hazoora in Hoshiarpur, and Sidhwan Bet in Ludhiana. Collectively, these yards aggregate nearly 1.25 lakh tonnes of paddy straw annually from over 100 villages, supplying industrial boilers and power plants across Punjab as a clean biofuel alternative. The processed bales sell to industrial buyers for Rs.320 to Rs.340 per quintal. Atwal says the net profit remains Rs.50 per quintal after accounting for field transport, labour wages, and machine maintenance, based on an average selling price of Rs.330 per quintal. Beyond residue evacuation, the aggregation chain has become a source of rural employment. Atwal directly employs a team of 40 local youngsters equipped with tractors and trolleys for field collection, while the associated stockyards employ nearly 900 workers for baling, handling, and transport. The timely evacuation also offers growers a key agronomic window. By clearing fields immediately after the kharif harvest, farmers can adopt a three-crop rotation-sowing early potato crop before planting wheat in December....