Agricultural Innovations Leading to Enhanced Profitability and Rural Employment

New Delhi, 29th November, 2010

“With unique partnership between public institutions, NGOs, farmers, private sectors and innovative approach a momentum has been developed to increase profitability, income generation and employment in agriculture”, said Dr. S. Ayyappan, Secretary, DARE and DG, ICAR. He was addressing a press conference called on the occasion of 8th Implementation Support Mission of World Bank on National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP).

Initiated in 2006, NAIP has made significant progress in moving towards its goal for sustainable growth in agriculture by bringing various stakeholders together, he added.  Dr. Ayyappan cited some noteworthy success stories happening across the country, such as export of jasmine flowers from villages of Tamilnadu to global market; development of value chain for conversion of banana fibers into fabric; and development of natural dyes and colours for textile industry. 

Dr. P.S. Sidhu, Task Team Leader, World Bank appreciated the role of NAIP in effectively teaming up with non-traditional partners such as IITs, IIM, private enterprises and other stakeholders to meet key objective of the project, “to contribute to the sustainable transformation of Indian agricultural sector from primarily food self-sufficiency to more of a market orientation in support of poverty alleviation and income generation”. He expressed his satisfaction and happiness on the progress of the NAIP so far and hoped that this partnership of World Bank with ICAR will lead Indian agriculture to next higher level.

Dr. Bangali Baboo, National Director, NAIP outlined the objectives and programmes of the mega-project. Being implemented for a period of six year, NAIP is one of the largest national initiatives of the Indian Council Agricultural Research (ICAR) supported by World Bank, he added. More than 800 institutions across the country are participating in the project through partnerships at various levels.  Four components of NAIP are addressing various issues related to sharing of agricultural knowledge for development, production to consumption systems, sustainable rural livelihood security and basic and strategic research in the frontier areas of agricultural sciences. In all 188 sub-projects are working towards the transformation of Indian Agriculture in network mode.

(Source: NAIP Sub-Project on Mass Media Mobilization, DIPA)