Achieve and Sustain Climate Resilient Agriculture Through Focused Involvement of the Farming Community: A Bottom-Up Public Leadership Perspective in Support of the Missions of the Government of India

摘要

The paper focuses on three important dimensions of climate resilient agriculture. (1) The various missions launched by the Government of India have set the context to mutually reinforce climate resilient agriculture. At this juncture, it is importantto prepare the farming community across the country to understand the benefits of preventive practices including conservation and help implement appropriate measures. A framework for capacity building of communities is presented duly considering the various initiatives launched by the State Agriculture Universities and the Department of Agriculture. This framework clearly states the synergies across programmes and helps avoid duplication of efforts. (2) It is also well known that farming community across the country has periodically shown that it is feasible to develop and implement locally relevant and innovative nutrient, bio resources and soil and water conservation strategies aligned with the goals of the missions. It is however important to sustain these initiatives to upscale them and help adapt them suitably for the benefit of a larger number of communities. It is equally important to define policies and plans to foster them far beyond the tenure of State/national initiatives so that positive results can be maintained. The architecture of some policies to meet this objective is presented for the consideration of the national missions. Communities and their leadership therefore are important in this context. Some institutional mechanisms to involve elected and non-elected leaders are also indicated. (3) The framework for capacity building and the architecture proposed highlight the integrated benefit of agriculture to tackle impacts of climate change. The photosynthetic ability of crops and associated vegetation has to be recognized and further strengthened by recruiting larger tracts of land.This will also expand livelihood opportunities and meet emerging food and nutritional security related challenges. These are critical aspects of sustainability and have to be addressed on a priority basis to complement the national missions through a bottom-up intervention. The spread and depth of specific and cross-cutting interventions are discussed in the paper.