Changi Kheti
Overview
Changi Kheti is the monthly Punjabi-language farm magazine of Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. Its title, in Punjabi, means good farming, and that plain promise defines the publication: it exists to give Punjab's farmers university-tested guidance on crops, animal husbandry and rural enterprises, in the language they speak at home and in the field. It is the Punjabi counterpart of the university's English magazine Progressive Farming, and the two titles together are described by Punjab Agricultural University, usually shortened to PAU, as highly popular, farmer-friendly monthly magazines.
Changi Kheti is not a general magazine with a farming column. It is a specialist extension publication, produced by a university Communication Centre whose stated purpose is to provide timely scientific knowledge and information at the doorstep of farmers through print and electronic media. Every part of its design — its language, its monthly rhythm, its mix of articles, photographs, success stories and editorials, and its distribution through farm science centres across Punjab — follows from that single job: moving research out of laboratories and trial plots and into everyday farming practice.
Publisher and Editorial Home in Ludhiana
The magazine is published from Ludhiana by Punjab Agricultural University. Within the university, the work sits in the Communication Centre, headed by an Additional Director Communication. The university's own account of the centre divides the work into sections. An Editorial Section publishes bulletins on a wide variety of subjects, the Journal of Research, university reports, handbooks and calendars, and the two monthly magazines — Changi Kheti in Punjabi and Progressive Farming in English. A Business Section sells and circulates the university's farm literature, dispatching publications to subscribers, selling through counters at the centre and in the Directorate of Extension Education, through Krishi Vigyan Kendras, the farm science centres known as KVKs, and through distributors and agents across Punjab and adjoining states. It also procures advertisements for PAU publications.
Other sections of the centre support the magazines indirectly. A television and radio section records interviews with scientists for broadcast and serves broadcasters, an art, exhibition and photo section prepares the charts and exhibits shown at Kisan Melas and maintains the photo bank used to illustrate university publications, and the centre as a whole builds links with agricultural institutions elsewhere. Changi Kheti therefore comes from a newsroom that is also a studio, an exhibition unit and a distribution business — an arrangement typical of a land-grant-style university whose communication work is part of its public mission, not an afterthought.
Language: Farming Knowledge in Punjabi
The defining choice behind Changi Kheti is language. Punjab's farmers work, negotiate, learn and pass on knowledge in Punjabi, and a recommendation written in any other language arrives at a disadvantage, however sound its science. By publishing its principal farm magazine in Punjabi, PAU removes that barrier. The university also publishes subscription and membership information for the two magazines in both Punjabi and English, recognising that the reader it most wants to reach will naturally deal with the university in Punjabi.
Researchers who have analysed the magazine's language confirm that the choice is carried through in style, not just in name. A qualitative analysis of Changi Kheti published in the Journal of Community Mobilization and Sustainable Development examined thirty-six issues, from July 2008 to June 2011, and assessed how readers received the contents. It found that technical terms were used less frequently, that the contents could be termed easy to understand for general readers in terms of the reading-difficulty measure it applied, and that readers found the material comprehensible. A separate readability study cited in later extension research put the average readability index of Changi Kheti at 7.7, and reported that the majority of articles in farm magazines of this kind fell into very easy and fairly easy readability categories. For a magazine carrying scientific recommendations, that ease is an editorial achievement, not an accident.
What an Issue Contains
The same research gives an unusually clear picture of what fills an issue of Changi Kheti. The quantitative content analysis of those thirty-six issues from 2008 to 2011 found that the magazine's space was occupied, in descending order, by articles, miscellaneous items, photographs, success stories, advertisements, editorials and illustrations. Articles came first by a clear margin — the magazine is, above all, a vehicle for substantive written guidance — but the supporting elements matter. Photographs and illustrations show a farmer what a symptom, a variety or a piece of equipment looks like. Success stories translate a recommendation into a neighbour's experience. The editorial gives the university a voice with which to address the season and the state of farming directly.
Within the articles, the analysis found that agronomic practices obtained the maximum space, while agricultural engineering occupied the least. Among agronomic practices, the majority of articles related to field crops, and the fewest to forage crops. That distribution mirrors Punjab's farming as it is: a state dominated by field-crop systems, in which the central questions of most seasons concern sowing, varieties, nutrients, water, weeds, pests and harvest. The university's directory description of the magazine is broader — research-based guidance on crops, animal husbandry and rural enterprises for the state's farmers — and animal husbandry and allied enterprises form part of the mix, but the content studies make clear that field-crop agronomy is the magazine's centre of gravity.
What Readers Asked For More Of
Reader research on Changi Kheti is revealing because it shows an audience actively shaping its magazine. In the study of the usefulness of the magazine's contents as perceived by readers in Ludhiana district, about 64 per cent of respondents wanted articles on plant protection and pest management to be published in all twelve issues of the magazine — in effect, in every month of the year. Only one respondent, by contrast, reported a need for articles on agricultural engineering in all twelve issues. The contrast is instructive. Pests and plant diseases are the recurrent emergency of a cropping season, capable of undoing a farmer's work in days, and readers wanted the university's guidance on them continuously, not occasionally. Machinery, by contrast, is a decision taken rarely, and readers were content to meet it less often.
The same body of research reported that almost all readers liked the magazine, that a majority found its contents fully comprehensible, practicable, useful, relevant, timely and highly motivational, and that all respondents in the qualitative study were satisfied with its periodicity and volume. A separate 2018 study of satisfaction with PAU's two farm magazines found that a majority of respondents were satisfied with the timeliness and content of the magazines. Read together, these studies describe a publication whose readers trust it enough to demand more of its most useful subject — a stronger endorsement than simple approval.
Audience and Subscription Base
Changi Kheti is written for farmers in Punjab, and its distribution follows them. Subscriptions are dispatched by the university's Business Section, copies are sold at university counters and at KVKs and Farm Advisory Service Centres across the state, and the university's Agricultural Technology Information Centre in Ludhiana offers magazine subscriptions alongside seeds, bio-fertilisers and other farm literature at its sales counter. University officers regularly urge farmers at Kisan Melas and other public events to subscribe to Changi Kheti and Progressive Farming, and the magazines are promoted alongside the university's digital services rather than in competition with them.
For scale, the 2018 satisfaction study reported that Changi Kheti and Progressive Farming together had more than 1.5 lakh — over 150,000 — subscribers at that time, and that the number was increasing at a good rate of growth. The study does not divide that combined figure between the two language editions, and this profile does not attempt to do so. What the combined figure establishes is that the university's print magazines, with the Punjabi title at their heart in Punjab itself, reach a readership large enough to make them a significant channel of agricultural information in the state — one that extension researchers considered worth measuring precisely because so many farmers rely on it.
Frequency, Format and Availability
Changi Kheti is published monthly, and the university's publications pages list it as a periodical publication with a named issue for each month — the PAU site listed the July 2026 issue alongside the July 2026 Progressive Farming. Monthly publication matches the crop calendar: each issue can address the operations, risks and decisions of the season immediately ahead, while a reader who keeps a run of issues builds up a practical reference library across the agricultural year.
The magazine is a print publication. Its printed format suits its setting: it can be read in a village home, carried to a field, passed between neighbours and kept for reference, and it reaches subscribers by post through the university's dispatch system as well as through its network of counters and agents in Punjab and adjoining states. PAU has also invested in preserving the title digitally in its own house — the university's library reporting records that Changi Kheti, along with Progressive Farming and the university's research journal, was digitised up to 2016 and uploaded to the PAU repository. The current issues, however, are a subscription print product, and the university's effort goes into selling and circulating them as such.
Place Among PAU's Services to Farmers
Changi Kheti does its work alongside a wider set of university services, and readers often meet several of them together. The Agricultural Technology Information Centre functions as a single window: a plant clinic where farmers receive diagnoses for nutrient deficiencies, weeds, pests and diseases; a seed shop selling PAU varieties and bio-fertilisers; and a literature counter where the magazines can be bought or subscribed to. The KVKs demonstrate technologies in districts across Punjab, the Farm Advisory Service Centres advise locally, Kisan Melas bring farmers onto the campus, and digital channels — the Kheti Sandesh digital newspaper, the weekly agro-advisory, the PAU Kisan App and WhatsApp groups — carry faster, shorter messages.
In that company, the monthly magazine is the considered voice. Where an advisory tells a farmer what to do this week, Changi Kheti can explain a practice fully, report the research behind it, and show a fellow farmer's results. Extension specialists presenting at farmer gatherings have advised farmers to read PAU publications such as Changi Kheti to gain the technical know-how on important agricultural practices — a recommendation that treats reading the magazine as part of practising good farming, not as an optional extra.
How to Subscribe and Read
The direct route to Changi Kheti is a subscription from Punjab Agricultural University. The university publishes membership details for Changi Kheti and Progressive Farming on its website, in Punjabi and in English, and lists the current issues on its publications pages. In person, subscriptions and publications are available from the Communication Centre and the Directorate of Extension Education in Ludhiana, from the ATIC sales counter, and through KVKs and the university's distributors and agents across Punjab and adjoining states. A farmer visiting the university for a Kisan Mela, a training programme or the plant clinic can therefore leave with the magazine arranged, alongside the seasonal packages of practices and crop calendars that the university publishes for kharif and rabi crops, fruits, vegetables and floriculture.
New readers who want to sample the university's approach before subscribing can use the same channels in reverse: the KVK or advisory centre in their district is both a source of the magazine and a source of the local advice that puts its recommendations in context. The magazine and the extension network are designed to be used together.
Role in Punjabi Farm Publishing
Changi Kheti occupies a distinctive place in Indian farm publishing. It is a state-language, university-published monthly that has been studied, measured and cited by extension researchers as a working example of science communication to farmers: readable without being shallow, practical without abandoning research, and popular enough to sustain a combined subscription base, with its English companion, counted in lakhs. Its contents give field crops and plant protection the prominence its readers demand, its success stories keep the university's advice rooted in real farms, and its Punjabi language keeps the whole enterprise anchored in the culture of the people it serves.
For anyone cataloguing India's magazines, Changi Kheti is therefore more than a title in a list. It is evidence of how agricultural knowledge actually moves in Punjab — monthly, in print, in Punjabi, from a university in Ludhiana to farm households across the state — and a reminder that a magazine's importance is measured not only by its circulation, but by the decisions its readers take after reading it.
