# Innovation In Indian Agriculture: Ways Forward For the past two days, i have been in a conference @ India International Centre, Delhi on Innovation In Indian Agriculture: Ways Forward organized by Institute of Economic Growth in collaboration with International Food Policy Research Institute, Delhi. It saw participation of agricultural economists from India and abroad who have been working on Indian agriculture. I attended all session and wondering how this conference could be a game changer to Farmers who are resorting to suicide and shifting to other occupation. From 2001 to 2011, Census report says that 8.6 million cultivators have disappeared. Researchers from US attributed this to low spending on research in agriculture. In India, IARI (Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Delhi) is a premier organization that has established research centers in various parts of India. These centers were established during Green Revolution period to train farmers with modern techniques of agriculture and providing high yielding variety seeds among other supports. Nowadays, there are many agricultural research institutes and they also have Bsc and Msc program in agriculture but students passing from these institutes do not work in agricultural sector and get lucrative jobs in banking sector and other non agricultural sectors. These Institutes run many farmer training program but transmission of technologies from Lab to Farm is very poor. There have been many new varieties of seeds have been established but they hardly reach farms. There are many concerns that still remain unresolved. And economists are very clever in running regression and using this techniques their presentation appeared so meticulous. Abhijit Sen ( Former member, Planning Commission) , Ashok Gulati (ICRIER), Ramesh Chand (NCAP) and several other bureaucrats from govt. dept made presentations. It was good event as one can watch discussion among policymakers and researchers and researches do not remain confined to journals only. Many solution were discussed. Nitin Desai said if we sit again in 2030 and discuss the state of agriculture and that time agriculture would shrink more and farmers would be a minority. I was just wondering if Indian farmer has any future.. Does Agriculture has any future in India .....It remains unresolved...and doubtful.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 11:05:31 +0000
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