Introduction: Agriculture is the mainstay of the Indian economy and constitutes the backbone of the rural livelihood security system. The farmers in parts of India are facing severe drought in the years 2015-16. The meteorological drought, Hydrological drought, agriculture drought and man-made drought conditions are the main causes. Related to the meteorological drought, Climate Change, Global warming and El Nino also responsible for drought. El Niño is a phase of what is scientifically known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle (ENSO), a temperature anomaly i.e., unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean. These El Nino events weaken the summer westerly winds (blowing from west to east) over the Indian Ocean. ENSO-induced warm zones in the Pacific cause the warm air to rise and cause circulation cells. Such cells along northern Australia, Indonesia and the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean could have their downdraft sides over a nascent monsoon circulation cell in the Indian Ocean, which would disrupt its formation, causing poor monsoon rains all over the subcontinent.[1]

Over 60 years since independence, India has made immense progress towards food security. But India has not progressed in securing the lives of farmers and dependent communities. India ranks second worldwide in farm output. The economic contribution of agriculture to India's GDP is steadily declining with the country's broad-based economic growth and undervaluing the agriculture produce and products. With the majority of the population dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, slow growth of agriculture sector despite the immense potential available for higher agricultural productivity, was a matter of grave concern.  To meet the challenges of 21st century and to feed billion plus population with only 2.3 per cent of global land resources and about 4.2 per cent of water resources, food security has to be at the core of the agriculture development agenda.

Sustainable growth of food production, ensuring effective and equitable distribution depends on several factors. Efficacy of value-chain management and enhancing the viability of the individual farm holding are two important factors. These factors move the agriculture away from being a subsistence occupation to a sustainable enterprise. In order to achieve this transition, there is a need to shift the focus from a linear and incremental model to a demand-driven approach to fulfil national goals and expectations, as well as nurture a secure and confident farmer.

Main problems of the farmers in the present context are: (a) spurious input supply viz., seeds, fertilizers and pesticides; (b) inadequate credit from institutional sources and dependence on money lenders for credit; (c) lack of water and drying up of ground water (d) farmers spend lot of money in sinking bore wells (e) lack of extension services particularly for commercial crops (f) lack of remunerative prices for many commodities (g) exploitation in marketing (h) lack of non-farm activities in rural areas (i) higher health expenditures of the farmers[2].

The concern is that the water table is going down, reaching critical levels and endangering sustained agricultural production.

Climate change is the emerging threat to sustainable agriculture. The promotion of resource conservation technologies well-supported by precision farming operations can help the farmers to minimize the impact of climate change.

In remote areas of the country, it is difficult to obtain pertinent advice from professionals in a timely manner. An important area of concern here is agriculture. Mobile services should be developed to provide the users (farmers in case of agriculture) advice regarding their concerns, such as plant diseases, and appropriate use of fertilizers, etc. It is not always sufficient to provide such information on a website, since the farmers would need answers that are tailored to their specific conditions. Use of smartphones and high speed data networks will be beneficial in this regard.

Another challenge in a rural setting is the information on right pricing for products (e.g., food, crops, etc.). There is a dire need to create strong market linkages for rural folks through Value Added Service (VAS) applications, to contribute to their socio-economic development.

New platforms are needed that help in the reduction of intermediaries by a direct-to-consumer approach. This is expected to benefit the producers by directly connecting them to consumers, thereby enhancing sustainability of their business. Thus, it is important to support access to high speed data networks in rural areas of the country[3].

Increasingly the focus of Indian agriculture policy is for developing infrastructure such as irrigation network, flood control systems, reliable electricity production capacity, all season rural and urban highways, cold storage to prevent food spoilage, modern retail, and competitive buyers of produce from the Indian farmer.

It was felt that agricultural development strategy should be reoriented to meet the needs of farmers and state and central governments need to evolve solutions to rejuvenate agriculture.

Agriculture in India has the potential for major productivity and total output gains, because crop yields in India are still just 30% to 60% of the best sustainable crop yields achievable in the farms of developed as well as other developing countries. Additionally, losses after harvest due to poor infrastructure and unorganized retail cause India to experience some of the highest food losses in the world.

The major concern in developing countries like India is that 60 percent of the farmers live on less than one hectare of land. The farming is not sustainable for a majority of small and marginal farmers in parts of India. Over the years they have been dependent on government policies and subsidies for power, water, seeds, fertilizers, minimum support price for the produce, etc. There is a need to liberate the farmers from the dependency systems.

The major causes of the agrarian crisis are: unfinished agenda in land reform, quantity and quality of water, technology fatigue, access, adequacy and timeliness of institutional credit, and opportunities for assured and remunerative marketing and adverse meteorological factors add to these problems. Farmers need to have assured access and control over basic resources, which include land, water, bio-resources, credit and insurance, technology and knowledge management, and markets. The NCF recommends that “Agriculture” be inserted in the Concurrent List of the Constitution.[4]

Food is the basic need for humans and agriculture is one of the means to meet the need. Farmers feed the world. The population is ever growing. The farmer’s community is a small group facing many challenges to meet the demand. There are several sustainability issues at different levels and scales. Such as, natural resources sustainability; existing farmer community sustainability; and the food security sustainability. There are also varied uncertainties, high input costs and fossil fuel based chemical agriculture systems make agriculture sustainability difficult. There is a need for sustainable food production systems.

For nations the food security is of utmost importance, but at micro level the natural resources and farmer community sustainability are the important issues. In India, average age of the farmers is about 45 years. Considering their ability to work in the fields and life span, the present farming community would sustain till 2020. The younger generations are not interested in farming. Indian agriculture will be in deep crisis by 2020 and more so due to the cost of chemical fertilizers and escalating price of petroleum dependent products.

Especially India aiming to become most populous country in the world by 2035, without food security there would be deep crisis. Although the farming productivity has increased still there is a need to increase the production to meet the growing population needs.

The natural resources such as soil and water are highly polluted. The alkaline soils in the irrigated areas is one of the major concerns. The reclamation of degraded and polluted soils is a costly and time related issue. Climate change is another pertinent and current issue and there are so many unforeseen issues too. Food should be produced in an economical and sustainable way.

The question is how agriculture can maintain a high level of production and in a sustainable way. Water is an important and meagre resource; monitoring and managing irrigation for sustainability of agriculture is a must. Farmers adopted the three dependent and ecologically unsafe methods for fertilizers, pest management and herbicides. These production practices have an impact on the environment. Connecting food production with practices of protecting the environment is needed. No till planting, terracing and contour planting are some of the good soil management practices. On the whole nutrient and land management and water conservation and utilization is an important aspect. The technologies have advanced greatly leading to increase in yields with minimal environmental impacts. At the same time farmers have to produce crops profitably.

A thorough study of agro-ecological conditions and available support systems defines cropping patterns. Based on optimal use of agro-ecological conditions and the efficient support systems, increased production and enhanced productivity need to be organized crop wise. This can be achieved through realistic planning based on an online, real-time environmental scan and also on knowledge of strengths/opportunities relating to the needs of agro-ecological situations. This means that we need to spot opportunities and threats. Scanning also involves collecting and collating information, and adding value to such information before dispatching it to appropriate destinations. As part of this strategy it is particularly important to make forecasts and early warnings by scientific and technical agencies such as the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) user-friendly before sending off the advisories. Expanded and creative use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is paramount for reducing the gap between the availability and accessibility to technology inputs, credit, insurance and markets in a timely and effective manner. This will clearly require what one may call a “trans-disciplinary” partnership between organizations such as IMD, Agriculture Universities, Central/States Departments of IT, Central/State Departments of Agriculture, as often happens when different players attempt group strategy.

It was observed from other successful models (microfinance SHGs) that there is a need for common interest for the farmers to come together. Some of the interests are finance, cooperative marketing, concessions, information sharing, insurance (risk reduction), etc.

Other common opportunities

• Cold or general Storage facilities
• Subsidies to construct storage facilities
• Central or state warehousing corporation
• Loan on the storage
• Grading and variable price for the produce - food processing

The farmers should be involved in the making of agriculture policies. The farmers would discuss on the existing policies, understand and adopt the suitable policies for their development, such as:

• Advanced planning and implementation
• Organized sectors like cooperatives
• Documentation of farm management practices
• Agriculture is like an industry (production & value addition)
• Using high technology in agriculture for efficient management of resources and quality management
• Adopting Systematic and Scientific approaches
• Accountancy to know the expenditure and profits
• Follow the rules for uniformity
• Transparency & accountability-no corruption- setting up values (non-negotiable)
• Collective decisions for implementation
• High mechanization

For the voice of farmers and collectiveness decisions through organisation, leadership is required. Through the leadership capacity development to the selected progressive farmers, one could do the following:

• Annual leadership summit for the farmers
• Annual farmer’s exhibition and awards to the farmers of national recognition
• Improving the information access
• Decision making support systems
• Information sharing technologies
• Participation in meetings at policy level
• Awareness and exposure for greater awareness

The farmers are not getting the right price for their produce. There is a need for farmers to fix minimum price for their produce in a geographical area. A circle is a geographical area with all the farmers as members growing different crops. The produce from other circles would be allowed only when there is a shortage of the produce in that circle or if it is not grown in that circle. Say carrots are not grown in a geographical circle can be imported into the circle. The minimum price is based on the cost of cultivation, management, processing and transportation, plus profit margin based on the quantity of produce / percentage of the value. The day when farmers are able to pay tax, it means they are getting right price. The National Agriculture Marketing (NAM), should protect the farmers interest too.

Indian agriculture is already increasingly demand driven. This will accelerate in the future. The fertilizers provided by the government on subsidy is costing the both the government and farmers a lot. The demand for fertilizers is ever increasing. To decentralize the fertilizer issue, the farmers should be empowered to produce their own fertilizers using locally available material and also they should not impact the soil and local environment. 

Soil is a strategic resource. Agriculture is one of the main causes of soil erosion and it happens in places where people are located. As part of capacity building of farmers, they would be trained to prepare soil amendment material such as ‘biochar[5]’ compost from locally available materials. Such as farm yard manure / vermicomposting, charcoal from crop residue / exotic invasive plants, soil microbes, etc.  The dependence of the farmers on the exotic and high energy input chemical fertilizers should be reduced. These fertilizers would improve the fertility by improving the habitation for soil microbes thriving, reducing the leaching of nutrients, reducing the impact of hazardous residue fertilizer chemicals and pesticides, improving the soil moisture, regulating the temperature of the soil, reducing erosion and absorbing the green-house gas emissions.

Peri-urban agriculture also called as urban agriculture is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around a town, or city. This agriculture also involves animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry, and horticulture. Urban agriculture contributes to food security and food safety in two ways: first, it increases the amount of food available to people living in cities, and second, it allows fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat products to be made available to urban consumers.

A common and efficient form of urban agriculture is the bio-intensive method. Because urban agriculture promotes energy-saving local food production, urban and peri-urban agriculture are generally seen as sustainable agriculture. The treated sewage water from urban areas is a potential nutrient enriched water to irrigate crops. The overall irrigation potential from the urban water sources is increasing.

There is some demand for organic products from urban people. Farmers would be encouraged to take up Organic farming. Organic farming is a form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control. Organic farming uses fertilizers and pesticides but excludes or strictly limits the use of manufactured (synthetic) fertilizers, pesticides (which include herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), plant growth regulators such as hormones, livestock antibiotics, food additives, genetically modified organisms, human sewage sludge, and nanomaterials.

The farmers practicing organic farming would do ecological farming i.e., without causing impact on the environment and also improving the fertility of the soils. The co-benefits are many in this type of farming practice. Both the farmer and the consumer would get benefitted at the end. The Central Government is keen to promote organic farming in India. Our, Prime Minister recently has declared Sikkim as the first organic state in India.

Cooperatives should be developed for sharing the machines and tools relevant to farm management and operations. A small farmer may not be able to buy the expensive machinery and also which may be used irregularly, say only during harvesting period. In this farmers, local farmers come together to form a machinery pool to purchase the necessary equipment for all the members to use efficiently. Based on their need farmers uses big machines and the cost will be shared when they do annual auditing. The maintenance of big machinery is run by the cooperative society.

The advantages are:

• Collective use of machinery will reduce the cost of investment
• Reduction in cost of maintenance
• Efficient use of resources
• Higher profits for the farmers
• Time management

One TV channel should be dedicated for the farmers (24x7). This channel could be owned and facilitated by the government. This channel would also be linked to the live webcams, and agriculture market price index, etc.

The farmers should know the live prices of diverse produces in various markets as we get to see the stock exchange prices. These prices would help the prices to make decisions regarding the crops to cultivate and sell. In this regard the central government has initiated National Agriculture Market (NAM) in April 2016. Which is a pan-India electronic trading portal which networks the existing APMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities.

The NAM Portal provides a single window service for all APMC related information and services. This includes commodity arrivals & prices, buy & sell trade offers, provision to respond to trade offers, among other services. While material flow (agriculture produce) continue to happen through mandis, an online market reduces transaction costs and information asymmetry.

NAM addresses these challenges by creating a unified market through online trading platform, both, at State and National level and promotes uniformity, streamlining of procedures across the integrated markets, removes information asymmetry between buyers and sellers and promotes real time price discovery, based on actual demand and supply, promotes transparency in auction process, and access to a nationwide market for the farmer, with prices commensurate with quality of his produce and online payment and availability of better quality produce and at more reasonable prices to the consumer.

Farmers believe that there is less transparency in the auctioning of their produce. The price that they get is based on situation and highly variable. The agents in a market place, cheat them by purchasing at a low price and selling at an exorbitant price. Farmers after coming to the market with their produce will have no other option but to sell their produce, rather taking it to other markets or back home. So they sell it sell it for whatever price they get. The same agent in the market after sometime sells the produce at a very high rate. As the agent is taking commission from the farmers for selling their produce (in percentage of the value of the product purchased), he is not supposed to sell it for a higher price or should give the same price to the farmer. The double margin (profit) business by the agent can be made transparent by installing webcams in the market place at several important locations and displaying the rates live through TV channel / Mobile based apps / on website.

The webcams installed at the farmers’ markets would help them connect directly with the consumers. There are three methods, which the farmers can adopt. Webcams would be installed in the market places where all the produce is displayed. Internet based display of products and communication this has become a possibility because of tabs and mobile phones are cheaper and accessible by many people in the recent times. The webcams and the price of the products would be directly displayed. Webcams brings a lot of visitors to the website through online chatting.

In the recent times we have seen the role and power of social networking sites successfully used for transparency, organisation, collectiveness and movements. The social network site is a convenient method for farmers to share and learn. These online networks would help farmers increase their knowledge base and also communicate with various stakeholders such as fellow farmers, seed companies, input agencies, etc. They could share information about the schemes / programs and also share on their success stories or losses.

Knowledge is power. Farmers to update themselves need to adopt technologies. Tablet with mobile phone facility have become cheaper recently. As compared to computers the operation and use of tablets is very convenient for everyone.  Farmers are willing to purchase subsidized tablets. These tablets would help them to communicate, share information, knowledge and get updated on all the aspects relevant to farming. The transparency and social networking would be highly achieved. Free internet facility should be provided to the farmers.

Develop an accountancy tool to help farmers to analyze the input, output costs and comparison among the common interest groups.  The documentation of practices through audio, video, would help in decision support for the farmers to adopt best crop management practices to increase the farm incomes.

A thorough study of agro-ecological conditions and available support systems defines cropping patterns. Based on optimal use of agro-ecological conditions and the efficient support systems, increased production and enhanced productivity need to be organized crop wise. This can be achieved through realistic planning based on an online, real-time environmental scan and also on knowledge of strengths/opportunities relating to the needs of agro-ecological situations. This means that we need to spot opportunities and threats. Scanning also involves collecting and collating information, and adding value to such information before dispatching it to appropriate destinations. As part of this strategy it is particularly important to make forecasts and early warnings by scientific and technical agencies such as the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) user-friendly before sending off the advisories. Expanded and creative use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is paramount for reducing the gap between the availability and accessibility to technology inputs, credit, insurance and markets in a timely and effective manner. This will clearly require what one may call a “trans-disciplinary” partnership between organizations such as IMD, Agriculture Universities, Central/States Departments of IT, Central/State Departments of Agriculture, as often happens when different players attempt group strategy.

The farmers are unable to get the price and the users are buying the produce at exorbitant price. The time lag between harvesting a produce and selling is high, all this is because of the middle men or agencies. To support both the farmers and the farmers, telemarketing is one of the adoptable practice. Telemarketing is sometimes known as telesales is a method of direct marketing in which the farmers solicit prospective customers to buy the farm fresh products, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing or television appearance.

The advantages are:

• The middle men or agencies are not involved.
• Farmers get profits; most often the agents buy the produce very cheap from farmers and sell at a very high price to retail sellers. Especially the difference of price is very high for perishable goods such as vegetables, fruits, etc.
• As the transaction time is less without the agencies, the produce reaches the farmers fresh
• The consumers would get the produce at a cheaper price as the agents are not there.

The mobile market is another way farmers would sell their produce at the consumer’s place. These mobile markets would provide the following services selling food items at community markets / mini-stops, and also do home deliveries.  The farm fresh produce reaches the consumers at a low price. The following items can be sold through these markets fresh vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs and sometime, grains and cereals. The consumers would also save time. There will be display of the timetable of the arrival of the mobiles to different places. These mobiles would support both the farmers and people living in urban areas.

The door to door delivery services would facilitate many working couples in the urban areas. The products would be packed and the clients need to pay the amount only after receiving and if they are satisfied. Some organic products from particular farmers who use least chemicals would also be in good demand from the clients. Some regular institutional clients (schools, hostels, hotels, etc.) can also bulk order the products.

The farmers can sell value added products such as pickles, dried items, etc. along with fresh produce. This would bring them additional income. The local area brands emerge, which support farmers and other dependent communities. The demands could emerge from far off places also.

Without farming community support there is no nation. They form the backbone and confidence of any country. Although they support the population to excel in all other areas in life, but the farmers’ security is rarely considered. Farmers should be provided with compulsory insurance for life and health. This should be at par with government services cadre. They spend their whole life on agriculture but never make any profit. Pension is another important support to be provided to the farmers who are no more capable of engaging in the farming activities. This support is possible if the farming community is organized. They deserve minimum price and the right to declare price for their farm produce. Governments should interfere into the system to support the farmers if the price of their produce is falling below the minimum support price. 50% of all reservations (proportionate) should be for the children of farming and allied community as they represent more than 60% of the population and contribute to the most essential sector - food security.