Sustaining Indian agriculture - : conservation agriculture the way forward

servation. INDIAN agriculture is now at crossroads. We have come a long way. Over the past four decades our strat egies, policies and actions were guided by goals of ‘self -sufficiency’ in foodgrains production. Indian agriculture has been succes sful in achieving increased foodgrains production a lbeit at a low level of satisfaction. While the mission of increa sing foodgrains production stands somehow achieved, these gains were accompanied by widespread problems of resource degradation, which now pose a ser ious challenge to the continued ability to meet the demand of an increa sing population and lifting our people above the po verty line 1 . Indian agriculture has reached a point where it must seek new directions – those by way of strategies, policies and actions which must be adopted to move forward. New directions are needed because past strategies are no longer ta king agriculture forward. Moving forward in t he present context also does not imply the same as was imagined in the 1960s. The nature and dimensions of the problems being faced today are much different and complex than those faced in the 1960s and 1970s. There appear no two opinions with respect to the need for further increasing foodgrains production for the gro wing population, and the need for healthy and nutr itious food continues. The past strategies to increase foodgrains production, however, have resulted in massive exploitation of natural resources, contributing to unsustai nable growth; there is need to change this in the future. This will call for strategies, which are different than the ones we adopted in the ‘green revolution’ era. Our only focus of increasing production (and for right reasons) in the shor test possible time led us to focus all efforts to more f avourable areas – those where irrigation facilities were either available or could be created easily. This led to the neglect of vast a reas of rainfed agriculture, where produ ctivity continues to remain low 2 . These are the areas where vast majority of the poor live in the country. Any efforts to reduce poverty must aim at improving the agriculture in these regions, and the past strategies have proved largely ineffective – mainly due to extensive problems of resource degradation – soil erosion and run-off and our inability to come up with strategies, which matched the socio-economic conditions along with strong technological and policy support. Also, in the well-endowed irrigated regions where high levels of productivity have been achieved, maintaining farm-level profitability is an increasing concern today. The gover nment is being forced to continue and further distort p olicies to protect farmers profitability, notwithstanding widespread and intensive resource degradation problems, for exa mple, declining water tables in the high producti vity northwest irrigated region will seriously constrain pr oductivity and ecology of the region 3 . High levels of fertilizer use and decreasing resource use-efficiency are increasingly contribu ting to groundwater pollution and increased emissions of green-house gases (GHGs) 4 . High levels of pesticides used in many areas have become a major health hazard. Thus, with continuously deteriorating resources, wid espread problem of soil and water contamination and eroding ecological foundation, sustainability of agriculture is becoming highly questionable