IF government statistics are to be believed, the Indian economy never had it so good. For the past several years, India has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The rate of growth of GDP recorded during the first three years of the tenth plan (7%) is the highest since planning began in 1951. Other macroeconomic indicators like the rate of saving, current account balances and inflation rates seem to indicate the economy is in good health.

Against this background, the story of Indian agriculture, in particular dryland agriculture, appears as an annoying twist in the plot. Available data show that 1990-2000 was not a happy decade for Indian agriculture. The overall growth rate of crop production during this decade was nearly half of what it was during the 1980s. The output of coarse cereals, pulses and oilseeds (covering about 45% of total cropped area and grown mostly in the drylands) fell during the 1990s and the rate of growth of their yields decelerated considerably.

All this re-emphasise the fact that the gap between irrigated and dryland agriculture has steadily widened, with the productivity of the latter being less than half of the former. This has been a direct and predictable consequence of the strategy adopted in the mid-1960s, whereby massive investment flowed to the already well-endowed regions and farmers of the country, leaving aside the poorer and less endowed regions.

Dryland agriculture emerges as the biggest drag on the growth of the economy. Indeed, the dominant strand of thinking among our policy-makers treats the drylands as a hopelessly lost bet. However, we should caution ourselves against such a hasty conclusion. Even at their low productivity levels, the quantitative significance of dryland agriculture is by no means small. It accounts for 53% of total cropped area, 48% of the area under food crops and 68% under non-food crops. In terms of production, drylands account for nearly 80% of the output of coarse cereals, 50% of maize, 65% of chickpea and pigeonpea, 81% of groundnut and 88% of soyabean. Half the output of cotton in the country is from the dry districts (Shah et al., 1998). Given its large size and extremely low productivity levels, a unit rise in productivity in this sector is likely to have the largest impact on aggregate crop productivity. There is clear evidence that the yield potential of dryland varieties is much higher than what has been achieved on the farm. It is more appropriate to view the drylands as a source for future growth, a hidden potential waiting to be unlocked.

 

Realising the potential of drylands is by no means a simple task. Spread over nearly half of the country, the drylands cover cold arid regions, hot deserts, hilly and undulating uplands, forest areas, plateaus, ravines and coastal and non-coastal saline areas. They are the home to 43% of our population. Water availability, soil conditions and the length of the growing season show wide variations here. Nine states (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) account for over 80% of the drylands. Annual rainfall in the drylands varies from less than 150 mm to 1600 mm. Soils vary from shallow skeletal soils of the deserts to medium to deep black soils.

The list of prominent dryland regions brings out their diversity:

1. Western Himalayas: Cold arid region with rainfall <150 mm and shallow skeletal soils;

2. Western Rajasthan, Kutch and northern part of Kathiawar peninsula: Hot arid region with rainfall <300 mm, desert and saline soils;

3. Rajasthan uplands (Aravallis) and Chambal districts of Madhya Pradesh: Semi-arid region with alluvium-derived soils and extensive land degradation leading to ravines;

4. Central Highlands, including Gujarat plains and western Madhya Pradesh (Malwa): Semi-arid region with rainfall of 500-1000 mm, medium and deep black soils;

5. Deccan Plateau, including Maharashtra and northern Karnataka: Semi-arid region with rainfall of 600 - 1000 mm, red and black soils;

6. Interior Andhra Pradesh (Telangana): Semi-arid region with 600 – 1000 mm rainfall, red and black soils;

7. Tamil Nadu Uplands and western Karnataka, semi-arid region with red loamy soils;

8. Sub-humid Eastern Plateau (Chhatisgarh), with rainfall of 1000 to 1600, red and yellow soils;

9. Sub-humid Eastern Chhotanagpur Plateau including Jharkhand, western Orissa and northern Andhra Pradesh, with rainfall of 1200 to 1600, red and lateritic soils.

The range and diversity of the drylands presents a qualitatively complex set of constraints which needs a more delicate mode of handling. We must give up the one-size-fits-all approach and focus on fine-tuning and matching our interventions to the subtle variations in local contexts.

 

At the outset, we must realize the crucial role the state has to play in a positive reshaping of the dryland landscape. In the current context of liberalization and dominance of anti-state sentiments (shared, paradoxically, by the staunchest of neo-liberals as well as the purest among radicals), this point needs strong emphasis. In particular, the key role of kickstarting the growth process in the forsaken drylands has to be played by public investment. The drylands are caught in a low-level equilibrium trap. Public investment is required to enable them to break out of this trap. The endemic process of natural resource degradation needs to be checked. Public investment in drylands has to be substantial, multi-directional and sustained over a long period of time. What we see at the national level is a clear decline in public investment in agriculture since the mid-1980s. This trend needs correction and the state has to step up its investment in the drylands substantially.

 

The precise forms such investment should take vary widely from region to region. Rather than being imposed from above, they must organically develop through an active exchange with the local context and its problem typology. There are examples galore to show how imposed, inappropriate interventions cause havoc. The desert region of western Rajasthan is one of the hottest regions of the country receiving scanty rainfall (100 to 300 mm) every year. Soils are dry during most part of the year. There have been several major attempts to ‘green’ the desert landscape. The most celebrated of them is the Indira Gandhi Nahar Project (IGNP), a gigantic water transfer project of diverting water to the desert.

Today, excessive irrigation and poor drainage planning has led to extensive waterlogging and land degradation due to sodicity-alkalinity. There are reports of hard pan formation beneath the soil layer. The severe ecological damage of this project that entailed an attempt to extend the green revolution to the desert is a clear pointer to the limits of human action in mastering nature. Yet, mega-schemes like extending the IGNP canal or lifting and carrying water from Narmada are axes along which solutions to the water problem of this parched desert landscape are envisaged.

Interestingly, the desert has a long tradition of local water harvesting for drinking water purposes and limited amount of agricultural use. Public investment could strengthen these. Tanka (or underground cisterns located in the middle of a large circular area which is its artificial catchment), nadi (community ponds usually constructed in inter-dunal spaces where there is some surface water run-off because of underlying geological conditions), dighi (small square or semi-circular, step-reservoir) and khadin (embankment built across slopes in agricultural fields) are some of the traditional water storage structures of the desert.

Similarly, there are groundwater harvest structures as well, such as baoris, kund, kuiya etc. The desert has developed some locally appropriate agro-forestry systems and traditional systems of addressing the problem of wind erosion and shifting sand dunes. A clear understanding of the scope and limits of such systems is necessary before we impose our external solutions through ill-conceived mega schemes.

 

Many other parts of the drylands also have traditional water management systems, such as tank irrigation in semi-arid South India and south-eastern Rajasthan and the ahar-pyne system of South Bihar plains. Without romanticizing ‘tradition’, we can say that these systems show minute awareness of variations in topography, soils, rainfall and crop needs. However, these have been designed for much smaller populations and their institutional support systems have decayed over time. Rejuvenating and strengthening these must be an important plank of policy intervention.

The experience of borewell irrigation technology in hard rock regions of western India shows that there can be no miracle solutions to the dryland challenge. The Malwa plateau in western Madhya Pradesh is a case in point. The semi-arid Malwa plateau has predominantly hard rock geology, being underlain by Deccan Trap basalts. The natural rate of recharge of groundwater in hard rock regions is very low. Hard rock aquifers can often be fairly large reservoirs of stored water (accumulated over several thousand years). However, once they dry up, they cannot easily be replenished. Increasing the depth of groundwater extraction creates a very real danger of groundwater mining.¹ This means that great caution needs to be exercised in the extraction of groundwater here. Such a careful approach never seems to have informed the groundwater economy of Malwa.

 

Since the introduction of the green revolution package, aided by bore-well technology since the 1980s, farmers in the Malwa region have been on a hot chase of extracting as much groundwater as they can. Subsidised electricity has accelerated the process. At present, uncontrolled extraction has given rise to a severe, man-made crisis of groundwater here. 60% blocks in the region are classified as dark or overexploited, meaning that their levels of groundwater extraction are unsustainable. Falling water levels are reported from everywhere and the area is in the throes of a severe drinking water shortage during summer. Yet, groundwater mining through deeper drilling continues unabated.

The priority intervention here is replenishment of highly depleted groundwater aquifers through strategically located surface water storage structures and sub-surface dams. These supply-side interventions should go together with regulation of end-uses of water through community management of groundwater, low cost drip irrigation and diversification of the crop production systems using drought-resistant varieties and crops that require less water.

A different package of interventions needs to be adopted for medium-rainfall eastern India (covering Jharkhand, non-coastal Orissa and Chhattisgarh), where the problem is severe underutilisation of available water. These economies are characterised by high subsistence orientation, small size of landholdings, poor irrigation infrastructure and heavy outmigration. Within this region, the tribal pockets are more deprived than others. Varying land slopes, water availability and soil depth define several land situations here. Public investment should support a basket of community-based strategies focused around utilisation of available water resources to improve productivity in each land situation. Detailed grassroots work has shown this possibility. With plateauing of yields in the traditional green revolution belt, the rainfed agriculture of the eastern region holds the key to India’s food security in the near future.

 

Yield is never the only objective in dryland agriculture. Dryfarming is an exercise in constrained optimisation of multiple objectives. These include household food security, fodder and firewood needs, minimum cash flow, use of available household labour etc. The risk of rainfall failure is the most enduring concern. Traditional cropping systems use diverse strategies like mixed-cropping and intercropping for rainfall insurance. The crop combinations and sequences are often highly complex and have come up taking into consideration minute variations in soil type, depth, crop maturity and susceptibility to rainfall fluctuations and household needs. As much as 60 crop mixes are reported to have existed in villages of peninsular India (Jodha, 1977). The number of crops mixed in one plot ranged from two to eight or even more. It is important to understand their value in terms of their contribution to stability of household income and maintenance of soil nutrient status. They are in great danger of being trampled over by mono-cropping practices once water becomes available.

We need not only viable agriculture packages but meticulously worked out land-use planning systems, which make careful use of available soil moisture through appropriate tree-crop mixes. Here, again, what works and what would fail will be known only after more detailed evaluation of such systems in the field. There are several dedicated institutes deputed to do this kind of work but their field presence is next to nil.

 

Another crucial area of neglect is livestock. Small and marginal farmers and landless labourers constitute almost two-thirds of these livestock-keeping households in India. Ownership of livestock has a crucial drought-cushioning role for small and marginal farmers. With increasing grazing regulations and encroachments of common land, availability of fodder from agricultural land is one of the central concerns of poor households, particularly in drought years. Hence, their seemingly ‘irrational’ preference for crops with a low grain/fodder ratio. In spite of the vital role of livestock in a rural household, strategies of improving livestock productivity and health have not been systematically integrated as central interventions in the drylands. Of particular importance is the neglect of small ruminants (goats), which are the major part of livestock holdings of poor households in drylands.

The range of required interventions extends well beyond dryland production systems. They encompass many other related areas and simultaneous action is required at all levels. Provision of cheap, timely and easily negotiable credit is one such area. Drylands are poor in terms of their banking networks. Informal credit markets with interest rates ranging from 60 to 120% dominate. Organisation into self-help groups (SHGs) and linking them with banks is an effective means of credit delivery to poor house-holds. Crop insurance can be one of the financial products of SHGs.²

 

On account of their low marketed surplus, many dryland areas have poorly developed commodity markets. Distress sale is the order of the day here, often to the same trader who is also the provider of timely credit. Creation of marketing networks through checking distress sales and pooling of whatever surplus the area produces, could be an income generating activity, which a federation of SHGs could take up. A crucial problem here is that of creating additional storage facilities for agricultural produce at the local level. Banks could finance such an activity, as shown by their recent experiments with commodity futures through a system of warehouse receipts. A much larger issue, needing greater consensus at the national level, is that of effective implementation of a support price policy and local procurement by state agencies of dryland crops.

To sum up, addressing the challenge of dryland agriculture involves implementation of a package³ of several interlinked components.

* location-specific public investments in water infrastructure;

* soil enrichment and control of land degradation;

* agricultural package of locally appropriate seeds and low-cost, sustainable agricultural practices;

* strengthening livelihood options based on livestock, fisheries, agro-processing and forests;

* better support systems through credit, marketing, research and extension;

* mobilization of communities around natural resource rights;

* learning from local contexts about possibilities and limitations of different interventions. This applies to all actors, scientists or government representatives, NGO activists or a member of local community.

 

Facing the challenge of the drylands is no longer a matter of choice. It is an imperative if we are to meet the goal of national food security in the coming years. Even in the most optimistic scenario of further irrigation development in India, nearly 40% of national demand for food in 2020 will have to be met through increasing the productivity of rainfed dryland agriculture (Samaj Pragati Sahayog, 2006).

 

To maintain food security even at the current nutritional levels, 102 MT of foodgrains have to be produced additionally by 2020. Cropped area has plateaued in India since 1970. It has remained static at around the 140 million-hectare mark for the last three decades. This is no longer a source of increased output in Indian agriculture. As for irrigated agriculture, its contribution can arise from two sources: (a) expansion in the area under irrigation; and (b) yield improvements in the areas already under irrigation.

 

The ultimate irrigation potential has been estimated at 139 million hectares, of which 75 million hectares is from surface water and 64 million hectares from groundwater (Planning Commission, 2002). As per Land Use Statistics, India’s gross irrigated area (GIA) was 75 million hectares in 2001, which left a balance of 64 million hectares yet to be exploited. Many states in north-west India have already exhausted their irrigation potential. Nearly 65% of this unutilised irrigation potential is in the eastern parts of the country, comprising the medium to high rainfall regions of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhatisgarh, eastern Uttar Pradesh and northern Andhra Pradesh. The GIA can be expected to reach a maximum of 100 million hectares by 2020. This is an increase of 1.25 million hectares per annum, comparable to what has been achieved historically between 1970 and 2000 (1.28 million hectares).

If irrigated area grows at this rate between 2000 and 2020, we would have an additional 25 million hectares under irrigation by 2020. Assuming the share of foodgrains in GIA does not fall, only an additional 16 million hectares of foodgrain would thereby come under irrigation by 2020. Now since much of this addition to irrigated area would be in eastern India, and given current low yields under irrigated conditions, even under a most hopeful scenario, irrigated yields here are unlikely to cross three tonnes per hectare by 2020. We can, therefore, expect expansion in irrigated area to contribute an additional 38 MT to the total annual output of foodgrains by the year 2020.

 

Another part of the additional food output could come from yield improvements in the areas already under irrigation. Out of the 75 million hectares of GIA, 46 million hectares were under irrigated food crops in 2000. Yields of irrigated agriculture in India began to plateau in the 1990s and have declined in some areas. Even if we optimistically assume that yield growth of 30 kg/ha is sustained over the next 20 years, the rise in yield by 2020 will be only 0.6 tonnes per hectare. Thus, areas already under irrigation could contribute an additional 26 MT of foodgrains to the shortfall in 2020.

The total contribution of irrigated agriculture to foodgrain production from both area expansion and yield improvements put together is, therefore, likely to be around 64 MT, still leaving a shortfall of 38 MT of foodgrains in 2020. In other words, even in the best possible scenario of irrigation development, about 40% of the additional supply of foodgrains needed to match future rise in demand will have to come from the unirrigated segment of Indian agriculture, most of which is located in the dryland areas. Thus, from the point of view of maintaining food security, there is no alternative to raising productivity of the drylands.

 

* ‘Drylands’ mean different things to different people. In this paper, we follow the rigorous definition developed by us in Shah et al., 1998.

 

Footnotes:

1. This is part of a much larger story. According to latest government reports, about 30% blocks in India are ‘mining’ away their groundwater.

2. A pioneering attempt at weather-based crop insurance for dryland crops is being attempted by DHAN Foundation in semi-arid Tamil Nadu districts.

3. The package approach was the strength and, to a large extent, the reason behind the quick success of the Green Revolution. An effort of comparable scale, though very different orientation, needs to be undertaken in dryland agriculture as well.

 

References:

Samaj Pragati Sahayog, Food Security in 2020: Drylands are the Answer, Bagli, 2006.

Mihir Shah, D. Banerji, P.S.Vijayshankar and Pramathesh Ambasta, India’s Drylands: Tribal Societies and Development Through Environmental Regeneration, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.

N.S. Jodha, ‘Resource Base as a Determinant of Cropping Patterns’, in Symposium on Cropping Systems Research and Development for the Asian Rice Farmer, Los Banos: International Rice Research Institute, 1977.