Empowering Indian Agriculture: A Vision for 2025

The global perception towards Indian agriculture is becoming increasingly positive, underscoring its importance in global food and nutritional security. To fully realise this potential, it's crucial to forge an adequate ecosystem that can support in making Indian agriculture more competitive and climate-smart. Thus, it’s imperative to move from the 'one-size-fits-all' to a 'tailored and customised solution' approach across the larger agricultural ecosystem.

The 4C Strategy – A Pathway to Transformation

The first step in this strategy includes strengthening the cooperative model and creating a successful lighthouse example. This is because this model has the potential to address the long-standing issue of fragmented landholdings in India, which has significantly impacted productivity and profitability. By strengthening the cooperative model, resources can be pooled, costs reduced and market access improved for millions of small and marginal farmers.

With this context, the Government should accelerate its efforts to modernise and strengthen cooperatives to ensure their competitiveness. A strategic step towards this could be that India takes the lead in celebrating the UN-designated year 2025 as the International Year of Cooperatives.

Linking Crop Diversification to Demand Trends

The second step could be linking crop diversification to demand trends. The Government could play a catalytic role here by integrating crop-specific value chains and providing requisite agri infrastructure and credit. Policy calibrations are important for farmers to successfully transit towards more sustainable, diversified and demand-driven cropping systems.

For example, crop diversification involving maize as part of ethanol production presents a significant opportunity for farmers towards creating stable market for maize crop and better price realisation. Maize-based ethanol is more economical and water-efficient and commands a premium among all feedstocks. This trend indicates a strong market demand for crop diversification.

Encouraging Climate-Responsive Research and Development

Third, it’s time to lift the lid and encourage climate-responsive research and development (R&D). With sufficient monsoon rainfall being a key aspect for agri output and productivity, risks in the agriculture sector have not reduced over the decades. Additionally, there are new challenges which are attributable to climate change. It is essential that the Union Budget reflects a futuristic roadmap for the agriculture sector with enhanced allocation towards climate-responsive R&D. Strengthening the toolbox for farmers with climate-responsive technologies is, therefore, pivotal.

Boosting Competitiveness of Agri Exports

Fourth, it is crucial to boost competitiveness of agri exports by ensuring an enabling ecosystem, emphasis on quality and traceability, and investments in post-harvest and processing infrastructure. In order to realise the 4C strategy, it will be imperative to focus on two enabling cross-cutting pillars – namely, technology and a future-ready, skilled workforce. Embracing technology and leveraging innovations from agri startups at every stage of the agricultural value chain can significantly empower farmers and enhance the competitiveness of agricultural products in both domestic and global markets.

In addition, it is crucial to enhance the support structure towards higher agricultural education initiatives to prepare the next generation of agricultural professionals. A triple helix model of collaboration among industry, government and academia is thus vital to drive the agricultural sector towards an inclusive, sustainable and profitable growth path. (Shashi Kant Singh is Partner, Agriculture and Food, PwC India)