Unfolding government policies towards the development of climate smart agriculture in India

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to map agricultural policies and programmes, with components of climate smart agriculture, implemented by the Government of India (GoI). Although climate resilience is not the explicit goal of these, our analysis shows that the GoI has been spending 15% of the total expenditure for agriculture towards enhancing resilience on agriculture to climate change. This expenditure has been made through micro-irrigation, watershed development and conservation agriculture under National Food Security Mission (NFSM), National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA), National Horticulture Mission (NHM), Rasthrya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), crop insurance, neem coated urea, and weather advisory systems. Moreover, the government of India is committed to invest Rs 838 billion towards development of climate smart agriculture in the coming five years. We can argue that the increase in public expenditure will also attract significant additional investments from farmers, private sectors and state governments. This large resource commitment by the central and state governments and the farmers of India will have a greater impact on agrarian economy and environment only if there is a greater convergence among different programmes and more farmers’ participation in these.