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ICAR Society Address Hon'ble Sharad Pawar Hindi Version Shri Kanti Lal Bhuria ji, Minister of
State for Agriculture, Dr Mangala Rai, Secretary, DARE and Director-General,
ICAR, distinguished members of the ICAR Society and Governing Body, special
invitees, Ladies and Gentlemen ! It gives me great pleasure to
welcome you all to the 76th Annual General Meeting of the ICAR Society. I specially
thank the members who have travelled from remote areas to participate in this
meeting. We are meeting within an year and during the period we faced some very
trying situations on agricultural front. The monsoon set in late and from
drought like situation we witnessed floods in several parts of the country.
Towards the end of 2004 the country was jolted by the Tsunami waves that caused
tremendous loss to property and life. I wish to share with you that the ICAR scientists
rose to the occasion and provided all the technological assistance to ensure
speedy rehabilitation of agriculture in the affected areas. 2. The government has set the
target of doubling food production by the end of the 11th Five Year Plan. This is a
very challenging target, as it will have to be achieved against a finite,
depleting and often degrading natural resource base. We have already reached
the limits of utilizing the cultivable land in the country, the availability of
good quality water for agriculture is declining and there is already evidence
of fall in productive potential of soil. The growth rate of total factor
productivity is also declining. This deceleration needs to be arrested as
enhancing agricultural productivity is the only way to remain a self-reliant
food secure India. We contemplate to do everything possible to ensure that our
National Agricultural Research System (NARS), steered by the ICAR, will be able
to develop suitable cost-effective technologies for raising agricultural
productivity to meet the ever-growing needs. 3. An overall strategy needs
to be designed to harness the potential of cutting edge science, supported with
state-of-the-art infrastructure and enlightened human resources, while
maintaining and building on the health of the primary production base. The
issues of productivity enhancement, along with minimizing production losses
through risk management, processing and value addition, commercialization, market
intelligence must be linked and addressed in a holistic manner. These are also
critical for ensuring sustainability and increasing rural employment, farm
income and profitability. This necessitates a close realigning of the
investment support being given to research and development efforts in
agriculture. 4. The advent of biotechnology
has reduced the whole living world to one common gene pool. Hybrid
technology has a high potential to increase productivity, resistance to biotic
and abiotic stresses and quality in a number of field and horticultural crops,
animals and fish. It could also impart resilience to production in fragile
ecosystems. Thus, biotechnology is globally emerging as an effective tool for
attaining new horizons in crop, animal and fish productivity, reducing biotic
and abiotic stresses, enhancing nutritional quality and shelf life. For
deriving benefits from the rapidly developing biotechnological advances, it is
essential to develop world-class biotechnology research facilities in the
country. 5. Seed is the basic
and essential input for agriculture and other inputs, howsoever technically
superior, are contingent upon quality seed for being optimally effective.
Inadequate availability of quality seed, planting material and germplasm is
presently a constraint for enhancing productivity. Therefore, production of
seed, planting material and germplasm in field and horticultural crops, animals
and fish has to be enhanced both in terms of quantity and quality. The Council
has recently formulated a major project to produce high quality seed and
planting material. I hope that the farmers would have easy access to quality
seed in near future. 6. The current levels of use
efficiency of inputs like water, bio-energy, plant and animal residues,
feeds and fodders, fertilizers, and pesticides, are unacceptably low.
Furthermore, when resources and inputs are used inefficiently both cost of cultivation
and threat for biosphere pollution increase and production decreases. Currently
mere 29% of the total precipitation is conserved, that too is not being optimally
utilized. With the existing practices, water use efficiency seldom exceeds 40%.
The inefficient use of water also leads to inefficiency of all other resources/
inputs. Hence, we need to adopt an integrated approach emphasizing on conservation
and multiple uses of water for integrated farming and wet land systems. Even in
the current year we have several States already reeling under the fury of flood
waters in the very first spell of monsoon rains. This warrants serious deliberations
and we must, in association with development agencies look into causes of
frequent floods and be able to develop technology to manage rain water and
prevent recurrence of floods. 7. Judicious and balanced diversification
of agriculture is a viable strategy to enhance income and employment and
promotion of horticulture in this direction would be the most relevant. With
about 150 million tonnes of horticultural produce, India is the second only to
China. The horticulture sector employs about 1.66 crore people who are self
employed, waged and salaried. The Government has launched National Horticulture
Mission with an outlay of Rs 2,300 crore to double horticulture production by
2012. The Mission will adopt regionally differentiated area-specific cluster
approach. This is a technology led development making use of precision farming
practices including micro irrigation, fertigation, tissue culture etc. It will address
development of infrastructure for production, quality planting material, postharvest
management and marketing. 8. A large part of the farm
produce is disposed off as unprocessed and current level of losses due to lack
of appropriate post-harvest handling are valued at Rs 60,000 crores per annum.
Post-harvest and marketing infrastructure, including grading, packaging,
transportation and storage, needs to be created on a large scale. Value
addition and processing industries offer tremendous opportunities for income
and growth, and would provide the much needed thrust in the growth of food
processing industry. This is important if we are to increase our agriculture
exports. The world agriculture trade is shifting towards processed foods that
constitute 35% of the trade of which 10% is fresh horticulture produce. I am
sure with an enabling legislative framework and technologies the private sector
would be willing to come forward to invest and take advantage of the emerging
scenario. 9. In recent years, quality, safety
and phyto-sanitary considerations have emerged as major requirements
in both domestic and international agricultural trade. The end users, including
farmers often face the problems in regard to quality of seeds, fertilizers,
pesticides, food, feed, fodder, etc. In the context of WTO, the importing
countries are also insisting on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)
standards for imports. These necessitate creation of appropriate facilities for
testing. Therefore, establishment of regional referral laboratories for testing
inputs and products for quality, safety and phyto-sanitary requirements assumes
critical significance. You will be happy to note that four such referral labs
have been set up in the country for quality assurance—for meat at Bombay
Veterinary College, Mumbai; for cotton textile at Central Institute for
Research on Cotton Technology also at Mumbai; for fisheries technology at the
Central institute for Fisheries Technology, Cochin; and for pesticides residue
at the IARI, New Delhi. 10. On the education front,
our position seems to be satisfactory with 38 State Agricultural Universities
located across the country besides five Deemed-to-be Universities and a Central
Agricultural University for the North-East, that develop and train human
resources in agriculture and allied sciences. It is time now that our SAUs
reorient their course curricula and place more emphasis on new and emerging areas
such as biotechnology, computer applications, GIS, IPRs, international treaties
and conventions, and on issues like codex standards, bio-safety and bio-ethics.
The change in agricultural education should focus on inculcating
entrepreneurship and professionalism in agriculture students. 11. The Council has
established a large network of Krishi Vigyan Kendras mainly for technology dissemination,
refinement and frontline demonstration of technologies. The farmers regularly
benefit from technology demonstrations, training and extension activities
undertaken by the KVKs. Today we have more than 480 KVKs in the country and we
plan to cover all the 588 rural districts of the country by the end of Tenth
Plan. The growth and spread of new information and communication technology in
rural India in recent years have reduced the physical barriers of interpersonal
communication, and a wide range of information and communication technology
options are becoming available even to remote and difficult areas. You will be
happy to know that about 200 KVKs are being provided e-connectivity to facilitate
faster flow of information. 12.
Organizations/institutions, are increasingly accepting partnership approach in
the form of either networks or consortia as part of the gradual shift in the organizational
structure of science and research. We need to carefully explore the possibilities
of promoting research partnerships between and among the public–public and
public–private, national or international stakeholders. This will not only make
research demand driven but also help in bringing the benefits of research efforts
to farmers more expeditiously. While adopting this approach it would be equally
important to consider and decide issues of ownership and application of the
results of collaborative research. 13. To be able to attract the
youth and educated into self employment, there is a pressing need to improve income from
the work opportunities in rural areas. The natural process of economic
growth-related shift from primary to secondary and tertiary sectors, is not
fast enough to address the issues of increasing unemployment, poor quality of
employment, educated unemployment and massive under-employment in agriculture.
Unless agriculture becomes economically rewarding, it will be highly difficult
to attract or retain youth in farming. 14. I am sure, your
suggestions and support will be extremely helpful to us in formulating future
policies of agricultural research, education and development in the country.
Finally, I would like to say that the Government has placed high priority to
accelerate agriculture centric growth. The ICAR is gearing itself up
structurally and as a system to deliver competently in a futuristic context. I
am confident that it will meet these new challenges posed by changes in
agriculture both within the country and globally with due commitment,
creativity and enthusiasm. JAI HIND !
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