India’s farm research system is being thoroughly revamped, with a new set of priorities to provide technological support to agriculture to face future challenges. The farm sector is finding it harder to meet the growing and diversifying demand because of climate change and depleting natural resources. Besides, farming has lost its remunerative edge. Agriculture education, too, needs to be reoriented to create human resources capable of developing appropriate technology and applying it to address emerging concerns.
“Food security is no longer a formidable task,” says Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) Director-General S Ayyappan. “With a foodgrain harvest of over 252 million tonnes in 2011-12, increasing it to 280 million tonnes – the projected demand for 2020 – is unlikely to be a problem,” he argues. The main task today is to reinforce the entire agricultural chain — from the soil and seeds to consumption and nutrition, and not merely from farm to fork. ICAR has set its priorities for the 12th Plan to address these issues.
The first priority is to reduce production costs to make agriculture profitable and raise farmers’ incomes. The mantra for achieving this is to enhance the efficiency of all agricultural operations. Greater mechanisation of farm chores is one way of enhancing precision in farm operations, cutting input doses and elevating crop yields and net returns. ICAR is setting up mechanisation facilitation centres that will validate the suitability of new farm equipment being developed by the public or private sector.
The second priority is to tackle climate change. Efforts are on to evolve new agronomic practices and crop varieties that will be resilient to climate change-induced factors like drought, flood, untimely rise or fall in temperature, frost, diseases, pests and other threats.
Crop health management is the third priority for farm scientists. New diseases and pests are surfacing, some of which have come from abroad. In cotton, for instance, though the dreaded bollworms have been tamed thanks largely to the use of insect-protected transgenic Bt cotton seeds, some other pests – notably plant sap-sucking pests – have become aggressive. Some of the animal diseases, like swine flu, bird flu and new forms of influenza have now become a major menace. Many of these pose a threat to human health as well, being communicable to man from animals and vice versa. This has necessitated the upgradation of disease diagnosis facilities, which is being done.
The fourth priority is “secondary agriculture” that concerns largely with pre-production and post-harvest management. A systematic assessment of crop losses made last year has revealed that these vary from about six per cent in cereals to as high as 18 per cent in some horticultural produce, like pineapple and banana. Such huge losses need to be averted with better techniques for handling farm produce.
Equally important is to facilitate the processing of the produce into value-added products. However, limited and seasonal availability of farm products make large food-processing units unviable, while smaller units do not yield adequate returns for investors. So, researchers are looking for multi-commodity processing technologies.
Next on the priority list is to explore avenues to engage the rural youth to prevent them from migrating to cities. There is no dearth of farm-related enterprises that the youth can take up with some training. These include, among others, agri-processing, offering farm machinery on hire and providing services in areas like input management and pest and disease control.
At the more fundamental level, priority is being given to revamp agriculture education to churn out professionals who can meet these new challenges. The curricula of agricultural universities have already been revised so that these universities do not merely produce farm graduates and post-graduates, but also farm entrepreneurs. The total annual output of agricultural universities, estimated currently at 30,000 graduates and post-graduates, is sought to be doubled to meet the anticipated requirement.
This package of priorities, comprehensive and need-based as it is, generates hope that the country’s farm sector will keep up with the changing times.
