While crop yields in irrigated areas are tending to plateau, there still is room for stepping up agricultural production from the vast rainfed tracts. The present productivity of rain-dependent crops is rather low and technology is available to enhance it perceptibly. This will, in addition, help raise farm incomes in the rainfed areas where rural poverty exists in its worst form.
Experts of the Hyderabad-based Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) are fairly confident that the productivity of the rainfed areas can be nearly doubled through known farm practices. This will help produce over 40 million tonnes of additional foodgrains, besides other produce, every year. In fact, the output of several key food and commercial crops grown predominantly in the rainfed areas, such as paddy, pulses, oilseed and cotton, can be enhanced handsomely by paying attention to the rain-dependent agriculture which has hitherto remained largely neglected.
In a recent paper on dryland farming, two CRIDA experts, Y S Ramakrishna and B. Venkateswarlu, have pointed out that vast chunks of land, totalling around 90 million hectares and constituting about 67 per cent of the country's entire cultivated area, rely on rains for growing crops. The average crop productivity in these tracts is only around 0.8 to 1 tonne a hectare, though yields of between 1.5 and 2 tonnes a hectare are obtainable with the already-available technology. What is needed, thus, is to transfer this technology to the growers and facilitate resource and risk management and market support.
Fortunately, the bulk of the rainfed acreage, over 60 million hectares, falls in the wet semi-arid and high rainfall zones, where overall annual rainfall is not too insufficient for crop growth. Only around 30 million hectares are in the arid and dry semi-arid zones where water availability is a problem. However, effective management of available rainwater is lacking in all these areas and need to be improved.
The real problem, as pointed out in this paper, is that most of the modern rainfed farming technologies are centered round water and soil management which essentially require community participation to deliver results. Approaches like rainwater harvesting and management through watershed development cannot succeed without wider community participation and cooperation. Water management at the individual farm level, on the other hand, requires construction of farm-level water harvesting structures which are inherently capital-intensive and, hence, unaffordable for most small and marginal farmers without financial support.
What is needed, therefore, is convergence of efforts as well as the resources available under different rural development and employment generation programmes for soil and water management on the basis of natural watersheds which may cut across block or district boundaries. "Watershed has to be the nucleus on which all public and private-funded farm development activities have to converge", maintain the CRIDA experts.
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Indeed, rainwater management approach was tried out successfully in some eastern states under the National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP), resulting in saving rainfed paddy from the ravages of drought in 2002. Some other states like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa can safely emulate this example. In fact, Chhattisgarh is reported to have already initiated a programme for this purpose. Experts feel that 25 to 40 per cent yield enhancement is possible through on-farm water harvesting.
Soil health is another issue that needs to be tackled to uplift rainfed farming. At present, the soil health in rainfed areas is steadily declining due to water and wind erosion and consequential depletion of soil nutrients. Strategies like integrated nutrient management, involving the use of organic manures, inclusion of leguminous (nitrogen-fixing) crops in the cropping cycles and other soil conservation and fertility restoration measures, can help improve soil fertility. A simple farm practice like removal of weeds can facilitate significant productivity increase. Promotion of mechanisation to improve efficiency of farm operations like seed sowing, nutrient application and weeding can also help enhance crop yields.
This apart, the cultivation of improved high-yielding varieties is not too common in the rainfed areas at present due to paucity and high cost of seeds. The seeds of crops commonly grown in the rainfed areas are produced generally by the public sector concerns having limited production capacities. The private sector seed companies go in only for the seeds of the commercial crops which are of little interest for the rainfed agriculturists. This issue needs to be addressed to increase the penetration of improved crop varieties in the rainfed areas.