Climate Resilient Agriculture in India

Climate change has affected the lives and foods of the world. It has changed the agricultural pattern of farming and has also raised the question of food security. WHO report has revealed millions of hunger deaths and malnutrition across the globe in the past decade. This pattern of hunger deaths and malnourishment is only going to worsen in the times to come due to the onslaught of nature fury.  To face this challenge, developed countries have increased their research on climate resilient-smart agriculture which gives primacy to high yielding varieties of seeds and transgenic to fight future challenge of food security for their counties. India is no safer from the threat of climate change. Thus, it is imperative for us to shift towards climate resilient smart agriculture to support India’s future food security concerns.

India adopted the BT Cotton technique in the last decade, which has benefited farmers at large. More recently, BT Brinjal is the new entrant into the BT Indian market. Efforts are underway to create transgenic of food items with high nutritional value to feed the teeming millions. India has adopted some of the latest techniques developed by Israel in the area of irrigation which includes drop irrigation and sprinkler irrigation. This has led to not only better utilization of scarce water resources but also increase in productivity of the farm produce. Government is focusing on making the best use of Artificial intelligence in the field of agriculture. Use of sensors to gather real time data on the growth of crops, pest attack, nutritional content of the soil etc; along with radars and IoT is on the rise in the field of agriculture. This is how smart agriculture landscape is going to be. There is also a greater focus on use of organic inputs in place of chemically produced pesticides and insecticides. Use of organic materials help in not only retaining the productivity of soil but also in ensuring higher nutritional content to the hungry hundreds.

These changes in the agricultural ecosystem would cover India’s future agricultural practice with respect to climate change and satisfy hunger of fastest growing population in the world. At present, India’s agricultural governance is suffering from criticism of HYV seeds and modern ethical question of transgenics which has affected life of poor farmers, and raised the question of seed sovereignty over traditional varieties or imported high yielding varieties with confusion that what should be given preference. The most important question that needs to be addressed at this juncture is how Indian agricultural research and farmers are going to adopt climate resilient smart agriculture in times of acute climate change pattern to achieve millennium development and sustainable development goals and centralize its role in reducing world hunger because of its seasonal and geographical advantages.