Sustainable Development for the Rural Poor of India? (Em)powering a Second ‘Green Revolution’

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Sustainable development in India must embrace the rural poor, as matters of justice and national food security. By forming the National Institute for Rainfed Agriculture, the Government recognised the importance of investing in rainfed agriculture. Yet most rainfed land is poor/degraded, and owned/leased by poor farmers with few resources to invest in improvements. The ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960’s has passed them by. Amongst the poorest are 30 million tribal people of the East Indian Plateau, who grow insufficient food in most years and have little access to off-farm income. The results are malnutrition, dependency on child labour, and high forced seasonal migration.

Like many NGO’s, PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development Action) has focused on community development through women’s self-help groups (SHG’s), and technical programs to support agricultural development. Experiencing the limited benefits of piecemeal adoption of new technology, PRADAN now consider integrated natural resource management is the only approach with any hope for environmental and socio-economic sustainability. This raises technological challenges (the multiple changes needed to effectively use rainfall) and requires new processes for working with communities: to envision better futures, change mind-sets from ‘beneficiaries of handouts’ to ‘managers of resources’ and from ‘risk-averse’ towards comfortable levels of ‘risk taking’. For development agencies, it means changing from ‘providing solutions’ to ‘participating in creating knowledge’.

We describe a partnership between PRADAN, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research and Australian scientists, in participatory research funded by the Australian government designed to develop appropriate technology and processes for community engagement: to empower local communities to embark on sustained development aimed at reversing land degradation and using natural resources more effectively to improve livelihoods. The paper details the emergent process of engagement, which focuses on family-wise planning supported by SHG’s, and the main technological advances around water ‘harvesting’ and improved farming practices.

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Peter Cornish graduated in agricultural science, then undertook a PhD in soil science and agronomy. He was heavily involved in the development of 'conservation farming' systems in the 1980's in Australia, and in the development of ideas around efficient water-use in rainfed agricultural systems. He then turned his interest to ways of reducing off-farm impacts of agriculture by changing on-farm management. This necessarily involved a landscape-scale approach to agriculture, including an appreciation for hydrologic processes. Landscape studies inevitably led to an interest in participatory processes for engaging communities in decisions about their future. He has also been a pioneer of participatory on-farm research in Australia. For many years, Peter has been interested in agricultural development in less-developed countries, and commenced his present work in India in 2004. Peter has just retired from the Fairfax Chair in Agriculture (Farming Systems) at UWS.

Mr Dinabandhu Karmakar has a BScAgr (Hons). He has worked with PRADAN since 1988, and was responsible for pioneering WSD interventions by PRADAN in several watersheds of the East Indian Plateau. He has national responsibilities in PRADAN to develop and support the implementation of integrated natural resource management strategies by PRADAN professionals, tailored to each agro-climatic region.