Yet, sadly, dryland farming has largely been neglected in the process of agricultural development. A major part of resources and efforts have been directed to shore up production and productivity of irrigated farming. Such an approach was understandable in the past when the need for achieving self-sufficiency in foodgrains was paramount and irrigated areas offered scope for quick breakthrough in yields with the use of water and fertiliser-based green revolution technology. But the continued disregard of dryland agriculture vis-à-vis irrigated farming, even after turning surplus in most crops, is inexplicable and wholly unwarranted.
Rainfed farming has to contend with several formidable constraints which the development planners need to bear in mind. These include fragile ecosystems, rampant land degradation due to wind and water erosion, unreliable rainfall, heavy population pressure, poor infrastructure and inadequate policy support. Besides, landholdings in rainfed areas are usually small and fragmented with a large proportion of them being economically unviable. These factors are intensifying poverty and increasing indebtedness, resulting in farmers’ distress and suicides.
A formidable weakness that makes it harder for dryland tillers to improve their economic condition is the limited scope for changing cropping pattern. The choice of crops has traditionally been determined by local agro-ecological features, notably the number of rainy days in a year and the amount of total rainfall. As long as the farmers stuck to the time-tested crops, the risk of crop failures was low. Most farmers, moreover, grew more than one crop, even in the same field (mixed farming), so that at least one of them would survive regardless of whether rainfall turned out to be excessive, normal or below average. Livestock rearing further helped them to hedge their economic risks.
The situation has, however, changed for the worse in the past few decades with the farmers being wrongly counselled, largely by input suppliers with vested interests, to take up high-value crops many of which are not ideally suited for cultivation on unirrigated lands. These crops require costly inputs, such as hybrid seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, which the resource-poor farmers in risk-prone rainfed areas can ill-afford without borrowed money. Introduction of Bt-cotton in the drought-prone Vidarbha region of Maharashtra is a typical case in point. Limited rainfall, low water holding capacity of soil and high credit needs to buy costly Bt seeds and other inputs have proved disastrous for the resource-deprived farmers of this region.
Fortunately, all rainfed lands do not fall in the highly water-stressed arid regions. A sizable part of them lie in the semi-arid and some even in high rainfall zones where available water, if managed well, is not too insufficient for crop growth. What is needed, truly, is on-farm conservation and management of rainwater. However, the water management approaches being promoted on a large scale in the rainfed areas — such as rainwater conservation on watershed basis — are essentially cost-intensive and require community participation. Such cooperation is, often, found wanting without the involvement of official agencies and government funding. Wherever farmers have been incentivised to take up individually-owned and operated water conservation works, such as on-farm ponds, these have produced better results with lower investment.
Dryland agriculture, thus, needs location-specific research to evolve new production systems or revamp the old ones by integrating modern technology with, importantly, traditional knowledge and wisdom. Efficient market support, in addition to effective means of risk mitigation, is absolutely essential to make rainfed farming economically viable.