Monsoon-Proofing Indian Agriculture: Pipe Dream Or Possible?

Relieving Indian agriculture from the perils of drought or monsoon failures; strengthening livelihoods of millions of farmers and rural Indians…

The title is kept intentionally misleading. Rather it should read making Indian agriculture monsoon “vagaries-proof”?

Two decades ago, we heard our professors saying “Indian agriculture depends mostly on monsoon”. Even today, it sadly remains so even today and probably will remain forever unless serious overhauling is done with respect to a few “Ps”.

For the number crunchers, India’s agricultural segment alone consumes about 80% of the country’s water use and is grossly inefficient though just less than 50% of the total cropped area out of 140 million hectares is covered under irrigation. Recently, Water Use Efficiency (WUE) and “Per drop more crop” became buzzwords for promoting water saving behaviour among farmers.

Collaborations are linked with Israel, one of the world’s most water stressed countries to learn from and adopt its model.

However, in reality, India has to first fix its problem with the first P – Policies. Promoting water saving techniques is absolutely necessary. But why should a farmer care at all as in most cases, he gets both power and water free? What are the incentives for the farmers to save water? On the other hand, what are the penalties for not indiscriminately using or wasting water? Isreal has answers for all these questions but India should think about it while making policies, which must be holistic and not made in silos. The simple principle is “you can’t control what you don’t measure”.