In recent decades barring a few crops such as wheat and rice, India has emerged as the largest food producer in world.
However India continues to suffer from –
1) Erratic rainfall - Bad spells of monsoon are known to bring disaster to rural economy and result agrarian distress.
2) Poor Yield - Despite the largest producer, India has poor per hectare yield in comparison to other developing countries such as Mexico, China and Brazil.
3) Wastage of water - Indian agriculture is not fine tuned to the scarcity, availability and necessity of water. For example – arid regions are known to sow water intensive crops such as cotton in Vidarbha and Saurashtra, soybean in Central India, sugarcane in Marathwada and Vidarbha. Also, Water-logging is the main cause of soil degradation in India.
These problems can be addressed with technological interventions offered by Indo-Israeli Agriculture Project (IIAP)-
1) Improvement of Yield – by adoption of crop diversification techniques. Optimising food basket as per soil and water, and climate condition, and nutritional necessities of population. Centre of Excellence established under offers technology to reduce post harvest loss, increase shelf life, incorporate biotechnology and so on. Soil Management techniques will increase the uptake of soil nutrition to crops.
2) Mitigating and adaption to erratic rainfall – employing integrated watershed management and water harvesting. IIAP offers to map the most suitable crops in arid and semi-arid regions. IIAP is also working towards cheap desalination technologies.
3) Improvement of water efficiency – Israel is world famous for its micro-irrigation techniques. India is already in process of incorporating drip irrigation to PMKSY. Almost 80% water used by industry and household in Israel is channelized back to agriculture. This is something India will incorporate through IIAP. Thus the focus of IIAP on water efficiency is – reduce, recycle, and reuse
CONCLUSION;Need for the hour is sustainable green agriculture. Israel has shown the way, as it is one of the most water scarce and arid countries, but has been a net food exporter and meets the highest crop yield in world. IIAP will be instrumental for India in achieving similar expertise in agriculture.
