Tackle depleting ground water, low investment in research in 'Amritkaal'

The difficulty in bringing power of scale to small and marginal farmers, pushing up the share of agriculture research to one per cent of GDP and tackling the threat to India’s food security because of depleting groundwater are some of the challenges that Indian agriculture needs to address in the next 25 years as the country enters the ‘Amrit Kaal’, experts said here on Friday.

Addressing a daylong seminar on ‘Agriculture in the Amrit Kaal’ organised jointly by Bharat Krishak Samaj (an agriculture policy advocacy group) and Rural Voice (a rural centric news publication) here in the capital, ITC’s head of agriculture and IT Business S Sivakumar said, “If we aspire to make Indian farmers prosperous we need to make them globally competitive.”

Also, the country needs to do more innovations and bring the power of scale to small and marginal farmers.

He said India has more than 1,500 startups working in various facets of agriculture but they need scaling up to help their innovations translate into incomes for a wider number of farmers.

CD Mayee, noted agriculture scientist and a former chairman of Indian Agriculture Scientists Recruitment Board, said that the country needs to integrate all the research institutes under the National Agriculture Research Systems (NARS) with the IITs, IIMs, sociologists etc.

He said India spends around 0.4-0.6 per cent of the agriculture GDP annually on research while the world average is 0.94 per cent.

“We need to at least scale this spending to 1 per cent of the agriculture GDP in the next 25 years,” Mayee said.

He said that the role of Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) and also their share in funding needs to be revisited.

Balwinder Sidhu, former agriculture commissioner of Punjab in his address said that groundwater depletion is a threat to Indian agriculture which needs to be tackled at war footing.

Summing up the discussions, former food and agriculture secretary T Nandakumar said that the mindset that any policy on agriculture is separate from a policy on farmers needs to change.

He said agriculture policy making should aim to set the farmers free and let him make his own decisions.

“Policies like stock limits and export bans ultimately hurt the farmers and we need to rethink all of them,” Nandakumar summed up.