Agriculture continues to be a dominating employment generating sector and contributes a significant proportion to the country's GDP. Even in the unfortunate pandemic, the sector climbed new heights with record production of various food grains, exhibiting resilience and ensuring food security. Despite the success in terms of production that has ensured food security in the country, food inflation and volatility in prices continue to remain high causing inconvenience to consumers and uneven income for farmers. Besides pandemic wrecking substantial physical, social, economic and emotional havoc on all the stakeholders of the Indian agricultural system, locust infestation from East Africa to India, Natural calamities, and depleting natural resources only added to the sector's woes. Even though the policymakers accelerated a raft of measures and announced reforms to give thrust to the sector, it has reached an inflection point that needs immediate attention.
While the Government is working on the blueprint for India@2047 to be 'future ready', it is important to accelerate India's growth and adoption towards new-age agriculture practices with optimum utilization of resources. The average penetration of micro-irrigation in the irrigated area (drip & sprinkler) is estimated at 17% which is much lesser compared to countries like Israel (90%), Russia (78%), Spain (75%), the USA (55%) and Brazil (52%). We need to have an ambitious target and align the execution process to take micro-irrigation coverage to 60-70% in the next 25 years.
Identifying areas and crops to integrate the benefit of micro-irrigation with structured governance and execution strategy will help the country climb a newer height of fiscal growth. To do so, the government may create 5 years bucket of appropriate execution and monitoring roadmap for the next 25 years backed by adequate budgetary support consistently.