Focus on green water and protective irrigation

One of the most deleterious consequences of the Green Revolution has been the neglect of India’s rainfed areas, which currently account for 54 per cent of the sown area. The key to improved productivity of rainfed farming is a focus on soil moisture (green water) and protective irrigation. Protective irrigation seeks to meet moisture deficits in the root zone, which are the result of long dry spells. Rainfed crops can be insulated to a great extent from climate variabilities through two or three critical irrigations, complemented in each case by appropriate crop systems and in situ water conservation. In such a scenario, provision needs to be made for just about 100- 150mm of additional water, rather than large quantities, as in conventional irrigation.

Clearly, there is robust scientific support for exploring alternatives to Green Revolution farming, which needs to be an essential part of the response to both the crises of water and agriculture in India. However, there is also a need to make a strong argument against any kind of fundamentalism on both sides. Those who insist on business-as-usual are being fundamentalist and irresponsible because they are turning a blind eye to the distress of India’s farmers and the grave water crisis in the country. On the other hand, it is also important that those working for alternatives adopt procedures for transparent verification and evaluation of their efforts. What is more, the efforts will need multiple forms of support from the government, similar to the multi-pronged approach adopted at the time of the Green Revolution. A few essential steps include:

1. Building on the intuition of the Prime Minister who initiated the Soil Health Card Scheme, the soil testing capacities of the entire country need to be urgently and comprehensively ramped up. This means not only establishing more soil testing laboratories, but also testing on a much wider range of parameters, based on the `living soils’ vision, where testing is extended to the 3Ms (moisture, organic matter and microbes). This will make it possible to assess over time whether the claims of different farming approaches can be validated as being truly `regenerative’ and for an assessment to be made about the kind of intervention that may or may not be required in each specific context

2. Widespread and affordable facilities must be made available for testing the maximum residue level of chemicals in farm produce, in line with regulations of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), without which there will be no guarantee that the produce meets required health safety standards.

3. This also requires large-scale and separate processing, storage and transport facilities for the produce of `natural farmers’ so that it does not get contaminated by the produce of conventional chemical farmers. Millets are crops where processing can be a challenge. Therefore, millet processing infrastructure also needs to become a

priority to incentivise farmers to move to watersaving crops and also to move them up the value chain.

4. The present farm input subsidy regime that incentivises production with a high intensity of chemical inputs must shift to one that supports the production of organic inputs and provides payment for farm eco-system services, like sustainable agriculture practices, improving soil health etc. This can, in fact, become a way to generate rural livelihoods, especially if the production of organic inputs could be taken up at a large scale by federations of women self-help groups (SHGS) and farmer producer organisations (FPOS).

5. The Shg-bank linkage would also be crucial in order to ensure that credit actually reaches those who need it the most and whose dependence on usurious rural moneylenders grew after strict profitability norms were applied to public sector banks in 1991 (Shah 2007). Shah et al. (2007) explain how SHGS led by women enable these banks to undertake sound lending, rather than the botched-up, target driven lending of the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) in the 29 years following bank nationalisation. The SHG-BANK Linkages Programme has not only benefitted borrowers, but has also improved the profitability of many bank branches in rural and remote areas, thus mitigating the inclusion-profitability dilemma that afflicted public sector banks in the first two decades after nationalisation. As a result, formal rural credit has once again made a comeback during the last decade, after a period of decline in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Such credit support will be crucial if the paradigm shift in farming proposed in this paper is to be scaled up on the ground.

6. Finally, the entire agricultural extension system needs to be rejuvenated and revamped, to make it align with this new paradigm. Special focus must be placed on building a whole army of Community Resource Persons (CRPS), farmers trained in all aspects of agroecology, who would be the best ambassadors of this fresh perspective and understanding, working in a truly `rhizomatic’ manner, allowing for multiple, non-hierarchical points of knowledge representation, interpretation and sharing.

Thus, to carry forward the agro-ecological revolution in India, there is a need for an overarching architecture very similar to the one that propelled the Green Revolution in its heyday, even though each of its constitutive elements would be radically different. It is only if the pattern of subsidies is changed and these reforms are put in place by the government that the paradigm shift in farming proposed in this paper will be able to take off in real earnest. Otherwise doubts about its authenticity and power could remain.

• Extracts from a discussion paper on “Transforming Water and Agriculture in India” by Dr Mihir Shah, Co-founder, Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS) and Vijayshankar PS, Founder Member, SPS.