Rainfed agriculture, practised in almost 60 per cent of arable land in India, is best pictured as small farms often with mixed crops, cattle and small ruminants, and an anaemic woman farmer.
Amazing in the diversity of biogeophysical features and production systems, marked by poverty and distress migration, it continues to exist outside centralized agricultural knowledge and policy.
Administratively, a rainfed agriculture tract is defined as districts where a maximum of 30-40 per cent of the gross cropped area (GCA) is under assured irrigation, depending on whether the district is in a high rainfall-humidity region or in an arid, semi-arid and sub-humid region.
Rainfed agriculture districts account for 48 per cent of the area under food crops and 68 per cent of the area under non-food crops in the country.
This sector has received limited knowledge and public policy support from the state since the Fourth Five-Year-Plan, which chose irrigated, chemical-intensive technologies in the high pay-off inputs production policy demands revisiting and reformulation.
It is somewhat odd that the opportunities for correction are being forced upon us by climate variability and change. There is evidence at scale to enable sustainable, prosperous and just rainfed agriculture systems in India.
Understanding biophysical resource
(i) Understanding resilience is central to the success stories of agroecology, natural farming, and organic/biodynamic agriculture that are happening within niche ecosystems across the country.
While some like the Deccan Development Society (DDS) and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF), have achieved scale and stability at different levels, they underscore the importance of understanding the biophysical resource base and its ability to bounce back to normal after it takes a hit with extreme heat, drought or floods. With the climate crisis, it is evident that farmers knowledge is crucial.
These farmers, confronting risks every season (without assured risk proofing irrigation), are the ones who understand and know how to respond to intra-and inter-seasonal variability in rainfall and temperature regimes.
They have access to landraces and local varieties with desirable features like short duration or pest resistance, invest in soil organic matter and soil moisture management, and have a mapping of the resource system and diverse crops, crop-livestock products that are mutually reinforcing and can be supported by the given resource base without undermining sustainability.
While these “pest scouts”, “millet sisters” and “farmer scientists” are celebrated locally, their knowledge of resilience and capacities to respond are lost to mainstream agriculture where they are recipients of technology and services supplied by the state, often designed for irrigated monocropping.
New experiments
(ii) Strengthening sub-national agricultural policy-making and implementation has taken on a purposive voice in rainfed agriculture States in India.
Agriculture is a state subject as given in the Constitution of the Republic of India. The centralisation and consolidation of agriculture was a demand for the uniform control and authority necessary to implement the irrigated chemical-intensive green revolution package.
But the economic and environmental unsustainability and poor nutritional consequences of this model as well as the available alternative production-consumption models, food cultures and cropping systems within different agroecological zones have led civil society organisations and State Governments to join hands in creating sustainable models of production and consumption in rainfed agriculture tracts.
The administrative ecosystem and programme guidelines of the APCNF, the Odisha Millets Mission (OMM), and the State Organic Farming Policy of Sikkim, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are new experiments bringing up new problems and solutions, given the stranglehold of centralisation and consolidation of agricultural knowledge and policy.
Despite proven capacities to formulate regionally differentiated policies, their demand for decentralized public investment and capital formation in local agriculture falls flat as the mainstream subsidized supply of chemicals, energy and water continue.
This supply syndrome demands reform to eliminate pollution, fossil fuel emissions in agriculture and to reduce the burden on the exchequer.
Community decision-making
Prosperous and sustainable rainfed agriculture systems need public investment to ensure protective irrigation, living soils, bio-watersheds, and healthy aquifers.
This investment should also support landraces and locally adapted seeds, local or on-farm bio-inputs, and local processing, storage, and market infrastructure, leading to increased rural employment and incomes. This is a fraction of what the state spends on dams, chemical industry, irrigation canals and groundwater extraction.
Here, the community level decision making and local government regulation and maintenance of these public investments demand capacities to make informed choices.
Community ownership and decision making for soil moisture management, crops and combinations of crop-livestock-inland fisheries, primary processing and local value addition, and short value networks are crucial in rainfed agriculture to confront the twin debacle of climate crisis and prolonged policy neglect.
The author is Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR