Agriculture: India’s investment in climate resilient agriculture, a worthy cause and a way forward
New Delhi March, 15 : Climate-resilient agriculture is a matter that is discussed by nations around the world, as it provides a hope of maintaining agricultural output while the country is facing climate crises.
Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) is one such government body in India doing a phenomenal job in this race against climate change and the sustenance of agricultural output. Established in 1929, the autonomous body aims to coordinate, guide, and manage research and education in agriculture throughout the country.
In a recent written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, the Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar discussed the admirable work done by the ICAR in developing more than 7200 high-yielding varieties of field and horticultural crops.
The use of these high-yielding climate-resilient varieties and calculated varietal replacement rates by Indian farmers has resulted in a total increase of 4.57 times India’s per-hectare agricultural output in kilograms during 2020–21, which sets at 2386 as compared to 522 during 1950–51. While also achieving a huge number of 323.6 million metric tonnes of the total production of food grains during 2022–23.
The developing nations of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region is expected to lose 30% of its annual yield by the mid-21st century. Thus, under the Consortium for Scaling-Up Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) in South Asia (C-SUCSeS), a SAARC-initiated program that focuses on bringing together agricultural research centers and extension agencies to develop and sharing knowledge on climate-smart technologies has engaged with ICAR.
The estimated average of 4 million hectares of cropped areas affected due to natural extreme events in India during 2001–17 and the major loss of $159 billion, which amounts to 5.4% of GDP during 2020–21, are some of the worrying numbers that show the dysfunctionality of the agricultural sector of India. To cope with all of this increasing use of climate-smart technologies by farmers, this is expected to work as a ray of hope.
