Surinder Sud: What's hampering farm research?

FARM VIEW

It's not the administrative structure, but the low level of investment.

The national agricultural research system, amongst the largest in the world, has been under the scanner for quite some time. The deceleration in agriculture growth, especially the plateauing of output of major crops, could be the reason for this. Several committees that have gone into its functioning in the recent past, have focused largely on the administrative structure, especially of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), rather than going into the root of the problem and suggesting corrective action accordingly.

Fortunately, this has now been done by the National Commission on Farmers (NCF), headed by Professor M S Swaminathan, in its third report submitted to the government last month. Very low level of investment in agricultural research and segregation of research and development "" the latter being a state subject "" have emerged as the key issues.

What is notable here is that more than three-fourths of the scientific manpower resources are under the states that account for less than half of the national expenditure on agricultural research and education. With the financial health of the states being what it is, they are finding it difficult even to maintain the current level of support to agricultural research. While the number of state agricultural universities has grown steadily to nearly 40, the funding levels have not kept pace with this expansion. As a result, the overall share of the states in the agricultural research and development has consistently been falling, leading to the degeneration of scientific manpower.

On the other hand, the strength of agricultural scientific manpower in the Central sector has more or less been stagnating because of curbs on recruitment in the public sector, virtual ban on creation of new positions, and bureaucratic hurdles in filling up vacancies. The average age of scientists has also been growing for these reasons. What's worse, all this has happened during the phase when the research agenda was expanding and diversifying. This has led to a decline in both scientific productivity and the impact of research on farm production.

The state level agricultural extension machinery, being inefficient, has failed to transfer agricultural technology to farmers in adequate measure. As a result, the actual average crop yields in most states are not even half of those in national demonstrations laid out to display the worth of new technology.

With this being the genesis of the malaise that afflicts the national farm research system, the solution to the problem surely does not lie in mere administrative reorganisation of the ICAR as suggested by the different review committees. The measures mooted by these committees, such as downsizing of the ICAR, dispersal of deputy director-generals to different regions or separating some of the key national level research and education institutions from the ICAR are, in reality, inconsequential.

The real remedy lies, as emphasised by the NCF, in pushing up investment in agricultural research, education and extension at both the Central and state levels. For this, the NCF has strongly recommended a one-time grant of Rs 1,000 crore to the national agricultural research system to bridge the critical gaps in scientific infrastructure in frontier areas of technologies.

Besides, it has mooted a step-up in the regular funding to the system from the present barely 0.34 per cent of the agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) to 1.0 per cent of the agricultural GDP. At the same time, it has called for the removal of existing serious imbalances in fund allocations to different agro-ecological regions and commodities by providing more resources to the eastern region to harness its untapped potential as also to rainfed agriculture and the livestock and fisheries sectors.

Justifying higher investment, the Commission has pointed out that the average rate of return on investment in agricultural research has been about 70 per cent with a median value of more than 50 per cent. Moreover, the marginal internal rate of return on research investment in the country has ranged from 57 to 59 per cent since the advent of the Green Revolution. These levels are the highest in the world.

Against this, the actual financial support to agricultural research in the country (0.34 per cent of the farm sector GDP) is only half of the overall average for all the developing countries (0.6 per cent of their agricultural GDP) and only about one-sixths of what the developed countries spend on this.