UGC Report on Inter University Center on Rural - Ministry of Rural ...

• 6. Policies are also required to take care of the victims of the bazaar, Special
employment policies have to be integrated to the extent possible with paradigms of
broad based growth.
Some Basics
• Short run difficulties are nested in the more basic challenge of limits to growth
imposed by scarcity of land and water resources.
• Per capita arable land is more or less the same as that of China. “East Asian Societies
have a concern for land scarcity which has come through decades. This is not
happening in India”
• There is little appreciation of the fact that growth has to come now entirely from
productivity improvement or increase in crop intensity.
• In some quarters there are tendencie to escape into utopias like interlinking of rivers,
multinational led contract farming replacing the raiyat . All such arguments may have
an element of truth and yet are not the complete answer
2.2 Knowledge as A Source of Growth
The total land area of India is around 3.3 million square kilometers with 7000
kilometers of coast line. The entire area is spread into deserts, hilltops, mountains, sea shores,
islands, valleys and plains. Out of the billion plus population in the country 70% live in six
hundred thousand villages. We are in the process of a societal transformation towards
sustainable development for our growth. India has gained the reputation of being a country
with the greatest human resource potential. This claim is based on the fact that its science and
technology man power will be a formidable force in the 21 st Century. Nature has also
endowed this sub-continent with lot of bio diversity, traditional knowledge, traditional
wisdom etc. The greatest challenge therefore is to transform the information and know-how
provided by extensive educational system and traditional wisdom into factors contributive to
the social and market economy.
Technology policies are not covering the last mile as much as they should. In the area of
seeds for example there is now emphasis on the yield potential gap. Take the paddy hybrids.
They seem to have finally taken off with the Agriculture Secretary announcing coverage of
over four million hectares. China was doing well and by now was crossing ten million
hectares. We were stuck at less than a million for over a decade. With area sown going down
and irrigated area stagnating, yield increase seems the only way out in the immediate future.
Hybrid paddy has great promise.
The research for hybrids in paddy started with a bang around a decade and a half ago. It was
directed by Dr. E.S.Siddiqui. There were a number of centers where the seeds were
developed. In others they were to be replicated. A national network was set up. By the early
Nineties around seven varieties were released in the South and East. The northern centers
didn’t take off. The KRH- IV in Karnataka gave a yield of eighty two quintals of paddy. The
CNHR-III in Bengal for boro paddy was close at eighty one and the APHR varieties between
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