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In 2011, India launched its first programme to enhance climate resilience of agriculture. The National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA), spearheaded by ICAR-Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), aims to improve production and risk management technologies. It was launched in 151 villages across the country for technology demonstration. But the programme has been far from being a roaring success.
Down To Earth (DTE) has visited some of the villages where NICRA was implemented, and farmers enrolled under the programme are benefitting from interventions like sowing crop varieties resilient to droughts and floods, farm machinery available for hiring, farm ponds and check dams. However, they find it difficult to replicate the measures as most NICRA interventions require financial and technical support. Besides, the interventions often address a few specific vulnerabilities and do not help improve resilience and climate-adaptive capacity of farmers. At the 15th high-level monitoring committee meeting of NICRA held in April, officials highlighted a need to prioritise research, upscale climate-resilient technologies and develop a methodology to assess the resilience potential of villages due to different technologies
Based on the principles of NICRA, Maharashtra launched the Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture (POCRA). With a budget of Rs 4,000 crore—70 per cent of which Maharashtra received as a loan from the World Bank—it is touted as the biggest climate-resilient agriculture project in the country and aims to enhance the resilience of 1.9 million farmers and 2.6 million ha in 16 rainfed, drought-prone, farmer-suicide prone, salinity-affected districts in the first phase from 2018 to 2024. The government established a separate unit to implement POCRA, which has more than 800 members and receives additional support from 7,000 officials from the agriculture department. “The programme focuses on interventions related to water security, protected cultivation in shade-houses, promotion of agri-enterprises like sericulture and agribusiness activities to strengthen value chains, by providing subsidies to farmers through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT),” says Vijay Kolekar, agronomist and soil science specialist, department of agriculture, Maharashtra.
Field visits showed that while the scheme has helped farmers obtain subsidies for benefits under 25 interventions, 77 per cent of the DBT has been spent on just three interventions—drip irrigation (52 per cent), shade net house (14 per cent) and sprinkler irrigation (11 per cent). Largely, chemical and input-intensive agriculture is promoted, which results in natural resource degradation and is thus unsustainable. Some of the technologies like shade-net house and poly houses need huge investment. Promotion of weedicides like glyphosate is a serious cause of concern, as POCRA has aggressively promoted practices like zero tillage.
“There is a problem in the design of programmes like POCRA. While it may appear that individual farmers benefit from the plastic-lined groundwater-filled farm ponds and cultivation of orchards, these interventions worsen climate vulnerability if we look at the target region holistically,” says Pooja Prasad, assistant professor, School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. “When the government subsidises water extraction tools for some farmers, others who are not part of the programme experience a trade-off, as water is a common pool resource. Since orchards need year-round irrigation irrespective of rainfall, their promotion under POCRA reduces the adaptive capacity of farmers to rainfall shocks,” says Prasad.
Another such large-scale intervention on climate-smart agriculture was promoted by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS), in 2010. It was implemented on a pilot basis in Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Maharashtra, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh. The CCAFS project ended in 2020, with little progress made afterwards. A 2018 study by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-profit in Delhi, finds that farmers in Haryana’s Karnal who were showcased as “success stories” in the programme, returned to other modes of agriculture as CCAFS’ interventions required them to purchase new farm machines, adding to their expenses.
It also increased their dependence on harmful herbicides, for example, through practices like zero tillage. Research published in 2018 in Cahiers Agricultures, a French scientific journal on world farming systems, shows that environmental and social safeguards are necessary to ensure climate-smart agriculture conforms to principles of sustainability. Globally, civil society and farmer organisations like La Via Campesina highlight that the members of Global Alliance of Climate Smart Agriculture are mostly from fertiliser industries and may promote climate solutions based on agrochemicals only.