• Home
  • Articles
  • COVID-19
  • News
    • Biotech News – Featured
    • Biotech News – India
    • BioMedical
    • BioBusiness
    • BioResearch
    • BioGadgets
  • Interviews
    • Interviews – Academia
    • Interviews – Industry
  • Issues
    • Biotech Express Issues – Access Page
  • Subscribe
  • Board
  • Advertise
Facebook Twitter Instagram
Trending
  • Editorial: What serious side effects reported after inoculation of Indian COVID-19 vaccines: Survey of AEFI reports
  • COVID-19 scientists are facing an avalanche of abuse, Science survey shows
  • Editorial: Plastic found in human blood – Call an urgency to switch to bioplastic
  • Guestorial: Demand for Nationalization of Healthcare Services in India
  • 19 Year Old Allegedly Dies Post Covishield Vaccination: Kerala High Court Seeks Centre’s Response On Parents’ Plea
  • Phablecare Raises ₹187 Cr In Funding
  • Pfizer Hired 1,800 Additional Employees In 2021 To Process Huge Increase In Vaccine Adverse Events
  • Experts write to PM against WTO proposal on COVID-19 vaccine waivers
Biotech Express Magazine
  • Home
  • Articles
  • COVID-19
  • News
    • Biotech News – Featured
    • Biotech News – India
    • BioMedical
    • BioBusiness
    • BioResearch
    • BioGadgets
  • Interviews
    1. Interviews – Academia
    2. Interviews – Industry
    Featured
    January 16, 20211

    Interview – Prof Rajeev K Varshney “The Youngest Indian Scientist (47)” who achieved an h-index of 100 recently

    Recent
    March 30, 2022

    Interview- Bioenergy: India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy started almost four decades ago…but did not catch up…, Professor Ashok Pandey

    January 24, 2022

    Interview: Prof Kailash Chander Bansal, Secretary, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), India

    January 23, 2022

    Interview – Dr Heera Lal: How an IAS officer using Biotech approaches to transform Indian villages into “Organic Villages”

  • Issues
    • Biotech Express Issues – Access Page
  • Subscribe
  • Board
  • Advertise
Biotech Express Magazine
You are at:Home»Articles»Sustainability and Precision in Indian Agriculture: a need of the day

Sustainability and Precision in Indian Agriculture: a need of the day

0
By Biotech Express on August 15, 2020 Articles, Articles- Guestorials

1Simardeep Kaur and 2Mahesh Kumar Samota

1Ph.D. Scholar, Division of Biochemistry, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi-110012
2Scientist, Horticulture crop processing unit, ICAR-CIPHET, Abohar, Punjab-152116
Corresponding E-mail: Simar2809@gmail.com

Agriculture being the lifeline of rural India makes it the second-largest food producer in the world. The ongoing agricultural activities are responsible for sustainable growth in agriculture, and making the country self-reliant.

Indian agriculture sustains around 18% of the world population on just 2.3% of geographical area with only 9% of the land globally available for agriculture. With the beginning of the 21st century, India has become a global power in major economic sectors with consistently higher economic growth.

However, Indian agriculture is considered a subsistence agriculture, which causes concerns for food and nutritional security. Moreover, it has become a thankless, risky, and back-breaking job, especially as it gives marginal returns. Just one crop failure, either because of abiotic/biotic stress or any other reasons, and most of the farmers loses their sustenance.

Indian agriculture, being the victim of the green revolution, in its way to intensive agriculture is presenting the dark reality wreaked by the inappropriate adoption of green revolution. Although the green revolution played a major role in boosting farm productivity and food security, we need now to adopt strategies for the evergreen revolution by embracing conservation and precision agriculture, combined with integrated nutrient, pest, and natural resource management for wider adaptability.

In the next few decades, the agriculture sector would have to face several threats and challenges in addition to the problems emanating from the imbalanced demand and supply. Seed, fertilizers, and irrigation are some of the important inputs in agriculture, but the sadder part of it is that often the farmers are not able to get the input cost, particularly because of very less minimum support price of the produce.

Some of the crops, like rice, require a considerably higher amount of irrigation water, causing the lowering-down of the water-table, soil salinity, and deterioration of water quality. Therefore, it would be appropriate to grow the water-demanding crops in the places with plenty of rainfall and/or in the areas having a shallow water-table. Moreover, to overcome the barrier of declining productivity, there is a need to herald a rainbow revolution by making a shift from wheat rice crop-rotation and including the nitrogen-fixing pulse crops in-between.

Studies indicate that nearly 121 million ha land in India degraded due to soil erosion and more than 8 million ha area is affected by soil salinity and water-logging, and the situation is becoming worse day by day. Problems are further infuriated by the imbalanced use of chemical/synthetic fertilizers and excessive mining of micro-nutrients from soil by crop plants, leading to the deficiency of nutrients in soil and reduced quality and quantity of produce.

As the Law of Marginality indicates that “cultivation on marginal soil with marginal inputs produces marginal yields and supports marginal living”, we need to adopt Zero Budget Natural Farming to minimize the input cost and to maximize the output to the marginal farmer.

With the increasing population, the demand for food and other commodities will increase, and it has been estimated that demand for food grains would considerably increase to 345 million tonnes by 2030. Hence, the production of food grains needs to be increased at a rate of 5 million tonnes annually. This is where science/technology can help further improving productivity for higher and sustainable agriculture. Therefore, to tackle the issues of food security and to feed the burgeoning population, we need to move from conventional farming to more efficient, sustainable, conservation, and precision agriculture with better natural resource management.

Since the natural resources are continuously shrinking and deteriorating, necessary attention is needed to improvise the agricultural sector, and the tools and techniques of molecular biology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology have the potential to address many of the future challenges.

In addition to crop husbandry, horticulture, animal husbandry, aquaculture, poultry, fishery, and post-harvest processing and value addition to the agricultural products are very much essential. The condition of agriculture market in India is not good, and unorganized supply chain from producer to consumer suffers from a loss of 18-25% of the produce.

To improve the shelf-life and demand-driven commodity traits of certain perishable commodities through different post-harvest processing can increase the availability of food materials to feed the ever-growing global population. Supports from the government would be equally important by promoting research and development in agricultural technologies, providing the timely supply of Agri-inputs, infrastructures to minimize the wastage, and agricultural e-marketing.

Numerous challenges concerned with climate change are appearing in the way to agriculture as it is aggravated to more frequent natural calamities like drought and flood, particularly in India. By the end of 21st century, the global temperature is likely to increase by 1.8-4.0°C, which might lead to more frequent extreme environmental conditions.

Therefore, to produce sufficient nutritious food for the continuously growing population under the changing climatic conditions and diminishing natural resources, a challenging task in front of the agricultural scientists of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research is to focus on the climate-resilient agriculture, conserving the stress-tolerant genetic resources of plants and animals, and minimizing the wastage of food materials by post-harvest processing technologies. Towards the protection of the environment, efforts should be made on the adoption of integrated pest management, developing more effective and safer pesticides, and promoting bio-safety/security components in the country.

The need of today is strategic thinking and rapid but thoughtful action that would result in increased production and reduced wastage of food materials. Continuous efforts have to be made to keep India moving forward and maintaining self-sufficiency in food production for sustainable food/nutritional security.

At the same time, the need of the hour is to improving farmer’s skills to adopt newer technologies for sustainable/precision agriculture. As Indian agriculture is heavily dependent on the natural resources, we need to give due consideration to the conservation and precision agriculture, zero tillage practices, integrated crop, nutrient, water, and pest management practices, and to integrate the various public sector support system with private initiatives (publicprivate partnership) for holistic development.

References
1. Bruinsma, J. 2011. The resource outlook to 2050: By how much do land, water use and crop yields need to increase by 2050? Chapter 6 in Conforti, P., ed. 2011. Looking ahead in World Food and Agriculture: Perspectives to 2050. FAO, Rome. (http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2280e/i2280e06.pdf).
2. Capper, J., Cady, R. & Bauman, D. 2009. Demystifying the environmental sustainability of food production. Proceedings of the Cornell Nutrition Conference for Feed Manufacturers 2009 (http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/). Cohen, J. 1995. How many people can the earth support? New York, W. Norton.141
3. Chand, Ramesh, Kumar, Praduman and Kumar, Sant (2011) Total factor productivity and role of public sector research and education in agricultural growth during post-green revolution period. National Center for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, New Delhi.
4. Deaton, A. & Dreze, J. 2009. Food and Nutrition in India: Facts and Interpretations. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. xliv no 7 (February).
5. Evenson, R. 2004. Food and Population: D. Gale Johnson and the Green Revolution. Economic Development and Cultural Change. 52, 3.
6. IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development). 2009. Global Report. Mclntyre, Baverly, D., Herren, R. Hans, Wakhungu, Judi, and Watson, Robert, T.(eds). USA, Washington, DC.
7. ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) (2006) Guidelines for Intellectual Property Management and Technology Transfer/ Commercialization. New Delhi, India.
8. ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) (2011) Vision 2030. Compilation : Dr P.K. Joshi (Director, NAARM, Hyderabad, India).
9. Jaggard, K., Qi A. & Ober, E. 2010. Possible changes to arable crop yields by 2050. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2010) 365, 2835-2851.
10. NAAS (National Academy of Agricultural Sciences). 2009. State of Indian Agriculture. New Delhi, India.
11. Pal, S., Mathur, P. and Jha, A.K. 2005. Impact of agricultural research in India: is it decelerating? NCAP(National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research) Policy Brief 22. New Delhi, India.
12. Rao, N. H. 2010. Workshop on Agribusiness Knowledge Exchange. 14- 15 April 2010, National Academy of Agricultural Research Management, Hyderabad, India.

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Biotech Express
  • Website
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

ISSN: 2454-6968 | Biotech Express Magazine publishes articles in the field of biotechnology and allied sciences in a way that have never been presented earlier. It publishes Editorials, Guest Articles, Reports, Interviews, Current News of Govt. Academics and Business, Research Highlights and Notifications of Events, Jobs, Research Proposals in the field of Biotechnology, Biological Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Neurosciences, Genetics, Medical Sciences, BioPharma etc.

Related Posts

Editorial: What serious side effects reported after inoculation of Indian COVID-19 vaccines: Survey of AEFI reports

Editorial: Plastic found in human blood – Call an urgency to switch to bioplastic

Guestorial: Demand for Nationalization of Healthcare Services in India

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Current Issue – April 2022

                   VIEW SUBSCRIPTION PLANS

JOBS/NOTIFICATIONS

   

         CLICK HERE FOR RECENT NOTICES

Recent Posts
  • Editorial: What serious side effects reported after inoculation of Indian COVID-19 vaccines: Survey of AEFI reports April 25, 2022
  • COVID-19 scientists are facing an avalanche of abuse, Science survey shows April 24, 2022
  • Editorial: Plastic found in human blood – Call an urgency to switch to bioplastic April 24, 2022
  • Guestorial: Demand for Nationalization of Healthcare Services in India April 24, 2022
  • 19 Year Old Allegedly Dies Post Covishield Vaccination: Kerala High Court Seeks Centre’s Response On Parents’ Plea April 15, 2022
  • Phablecare Raises ₹187 Cr In Funding April 11, 2022
  • Pfizer Hired 1,800 Additional Employees In 2021 To Process Huge Increase In Vaccine Adverse Events April 9, 2022
  • Experts write to PM against WTO proposal on COVID-19 vaccine waivers April 8, 2022
  • Bose Institute Scientists earn retraction due to manipulation April 5, 2022
  • WHO suspends Covaxin supply to UN agencies April 4, 2022
  • Lockdowns, Not the Pandemic, Created Havoc April 1, 2022
  • WHO selects Biological E to transfer mRNA COVID vaccine tech April 1, 2022
  • Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and MediCane Health Announce the Launch of Medical Cannabis Products in Germany April 1, 2022
  • New Zealand High Court ENDS Vaccine Mandate: “It’s a Gross Violation of Human Rights” April 1, 2022
  • S&T Ministry to support startup in medical implants March 31, 2022
  • FDA Clears Marketing of Genome-Edited Beef Cattle March 30, 2022
  • Interview- Bioenergy: India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy started almost four decades ago…but did not catch up…, Professor Ashok Pandey March 30, 2022
  • Undisclosed industry payments rampant in drug-trial papers in Australia March 29, 2022
  • Fraud Trial of Former Theranos Executive Ramesh’ Sunny’ Balwani Begins March 29, 2022
  • Substandard, fake medical products increased by almost 47% from 2020 to 2021 during pandemic: report March 29, 2022
  • Editorial: Biofuels in India – a perfect waste to wealth and net zero emission energy option March 29, 2022
  • Bharat Biotech and BIOFABRI partner to develop, manufacture and distribute novel TB vaccine March 28, 2022
  • Fibroheal raises debt funding from BIRAC March 28, 2022
  • Editorial – Energy, Renewable Energy and Bioenergy March 28, 2022
  • IISc, India to set up public health centre with Rs105 cr funding from philanthropist March 27, 2022
  • Tamil Nadu makes scientifically dubious claim on vaccines in the Supreme Court March 27, 2022
  • Guest Article: GENE EDITED-CRISPERED FLOWERS: Blooming with grace March 27, 2022
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden admin operated with missing data as CDC issued pandemic guidance, emails show March 25, 2022
  • Contents – February 2022 March 3, 2022
  • Drs Ella deserve Padma Award for their innovations and management in biotechnology: India’s pioneer recombinant biologist Prof Ramareddy Guntaka February 26, 2022
Archives
Categories
  • Articles
  • Articles- Editorials
  • Articles- Guestorials
  • Articles- News Reports
  • BioControversial
  • BioEvents
  • BioGadgets
  • BioPolicies
  • BioResearch – Academic
  • BioResearch – Industry
  • Biotech – Agriculture
  • Biotech – Healthcare
  • Biotech – Supplies
  • Biotech News – Featured
  • Biotech News – India
  • Biotech News – Industry
  • Contents
  • Interviews
  • Interviews – Academia
  • Interviews – Industry
  • SARS- CoV2 & COVID-19 Updates
  • startups
About Us

Biotech Express Magazine publishes articles in the field of biotechnology and allied sciences in a way that have never been presented earlier. It publishes Editorials, Guest Articles, Reports,  Interviews, Current News of Govt. Academics and Business, Research Highlights and Notifications of Events, Jobs, Research Proposals in the field of Biotechnology and allied sciences like Biological Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Neurology, Genetics, Medical Sciences, BioPharma etc.

Call us: _91-9311986177

Email – biotechexpressindia@gmail.com

About Us

About Biotech Express

Advisory and Editorial Board

Contact Us

Policy and Guidelines

Submission policies

Peer review policy    

Copyright policy

 

Follow Us
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies. Copyright © 2013-2020 Biotech Express except certain content provided by third parties.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.