Rain-fed agriculture, which covers about 60 percent of India’s arable land, is best depicted as small farms with mixed crops, cattle, small ruminants, and anemic women farmers.
Amazing for its diversity of biogeophysical features and production systems, and marked by poverty and destitution-driven migration, the region continues to exist outside centralized agricultural knowledge and policies.
Administratively, rain-fed agricultural areas are defined as areas where up to 30-40 percent of the total cultivated area (GCA) is reliably irrigated, depending on whether the area is in a high rainfall and humid region or in an arid, semi-arid or sub-humid region.
Rain-fed areas account for 48 percent of the country’s area under food crops and 68 percent of the area under non-food crops.
The sector requires rethinking and reformulation as it has received limited knowledge and public policy support from the government since the Fourth Five-Year Plan and high-return input production policies have favoured irrigation and chemical-intensive technologies.
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It is somewhat odd that climate change is forcing us into an opportunity for correction. In India, we have extensive evidence that sustainable, thriving and equitable rain-fed agricultural systems are possible.
Understanding biophysical resources
(i) Understanding resilience is central to the success stories of agroecology, natural farming and organic/biodynamic agriculture taking place within niche ecosystems across the country.
Organizations such as Deccan Development Society (DDS) and Andhra Pradesh Community Controlled Natural Farming (APCNF) have achieved different levels of scale and stability but also emphasise the importance of understanding the biophysical resource base and its ability to bounce back after extreme heat, drought, floods etc. It is clear that farmer knowledge is crucial in the climate crisis.
These are farmers who face risk every season (and whose irrigation is not guaranteed) and who understand and know how to respond to seasonal and inter-seasonal fluctuations in rainfall and temperature.
They have access to landraces and local varieties with desirable traits such as short growing seasons and pest resistance, they invest in soil organic matter and soil moisture management, and they have resource systems and diverse crop and crop-livestock mapping that are mutually reinforcing and can be supported by a given resource base without compromising sustainability.
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These “pest scouts,” “millet sisters” and “farmer scientists” are celebrated locally, but their knowledge of resilience and response capacity is lost in mainstream agriculture, the recipient of state-provided technologies and services often designed for irrigated monocultures.
A new experiment
(ii) Strengthening agricultural policy formulation and implementation at the local level is a key challenge in India’s rain-fed states.
Agriculture is a State subject as enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of India. The centralization and consolidation of agriculture was a call for uniformed control and authority needed to implement the irrigation and chemical-intensive Green Revolution programme.
However, this model is economically, environmentally and nutritionally unsustainable, and the existence of alternative production and consumption models, food cultures and cultivation systems within different agro-ecological zones has prompted civil society organisations and state governments to work together to develop sustainable models of production and consumption in rain-fed areas.
The administrative ecosystem and program guidelines of APCNF, Odisha Millet Mission (OMM), state organic farming policies of Sikkim, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are new experiments bringing new problems and solutions, given the constraints of centralisation and integration of agricultural knowledge and policies.
Despite their demonstrated capacity for localized policy differentiation, their demands for decentralized public investment and capital formation in rural agriculture have gone completely unmet, amid continued mainstream subsidized supplies of chemicals, energy, and water.
This supply syndrome calls for reforms to eliminate pollution and fossil fuel emissions in agriculture and reduce the burden on the state exchequer.
Community decision-making
Thriving, sustainable rainfed agricultural systems require public investments to ensure conservation irrigation, living soils, biological watersheds and healthy aquifers.
This investment would also support indigenous and locally adapted seeds, local or on-farm bioinputs, and local processing, storage, and market infrastructure, which should lead to increased rural jobs and incomes – at a fraction of what the state is spending on dams, chemical industries, irrigation canals, and groundwater abstraction.
Here, community-level decision-making and local governments regulating and sustaining these public investments requires the ability to make informed choices.
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Community ownership and decision-making over soil moisture management, crops, crop-livestock-inland fisheries combinations, primary processing and local value addition, and short-term value networks are crucial in rainfed agriculture to confront the dual threats of climate crisis and long-term policy neglect.
The author is Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institute of Advanced Studies, Delhi.
