Tenets of a second Green Revolution

The idea of a second Green Revolution has got an official stamp. While preparing for the 11th Five-Year Plan recently, the National Development Council convened a special meeting on the overall agriculture scenario of the country, particularly in rainfed areas. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was categorical: “We need a second Green Revolution with a focus on rainfed areas. The first one has developed technology fatigue.”

Coming from Singh, it hinted at a great crisis. This is the first time that a PM has declared the ineffectiveness of the Green Revolution in resurrecting agriculture.

The PM dropped obvious clues. It is now inevitable that rainfed areas have to be the focus of India’s future agricultural revival. Despite not being favoured by policy makers, rainfed areas constitute two-thirds of our agriculture lands and produce more than 40 per cent of foodgrain.

The Green Revolution areas have now exhausted their productivity, and are registering stagnation or negative growth in production. This means that to meet the food demand of an increasing population, we have to exploit rainfed areas. Government estimates suggest that around 40 per cent of the food demand in 2020 will have to be met from rainfed areas.

However, our experience shows that we need a different paradigm of development. There is an urgent need to change the mindset of the Green Revolution era, which focused more on inputs and did not look at regional variations in eco-systems. The principles of the Green Revolution are unsuitable for rainfed areas.

The first and foremost shift should be from ‘input centricity’ in the agriculture policy to ‘needs/requirements’. At present all subsidies are packaged in inputs -- be it fertilisers, electricity, water, seeds. Much of the chemical inputs are a substitute for ‘labour’. They lead to externalisation of inputs, and can be devastating for farmers in rainfed areas.

In its recommendations for improving the drought prone area programme, the Hanumantha Rao committee had in 1994 suggested that any area development programme must be location specific, and must be based on the current status of natural resources such as vegetation cover and groundwater recharge. Rainfed farming and its sustenance have to be seen and understood in greater depth by policy makers.

One of the major challenges being faced by rainfed agriculture in India today is to conserve and enhance the inherent capacity of its land and other natural resources to sustain agriculture. Any erosion of this inherent capacity will threaten India’s food security and agriculture.

In order to constantly address this concern along with increasing production of food grains and other agricultural products, it is necessary to: a) enhance and conserve the stock of available land, water and other natural resources, and b) develop improved technologies, which maintain and improve the productive capacity of natural resources.

The decrease in rainfed areas or the increase in irrigated areas has been due to the increase in groundwater use. But as the trend shows, recharge of groundwater is hardly being addressed in the current watershed development programmes. Thus the focus should now be on recharging groundwater in rainfed areas along with surface storage and management.

For improving the country’s water conservation strategy, there has been a suggestion of providing labour under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for digging ponds in private land.

NREGA could be used for producing biomass (even on private land) for improving soil fertility. The time has also come to integrate dryland food grains into the public distribution system and other food for work programmes so that dryland agriculture products get a market.