Rice mechanization in India - key to enhance productivity and profitability

Long-term and seasonal variations in weather conditions, salt intrusion, waterlogging, and/or freshwater availability are some of the major factors that made coastal zones highly diverse, fragile, and vulnerable. Weather disturbances are common and are further aggravated by climate change. Competition among resource users usually leads to environmental and social challenges that need to be addressed at local and regional levels. These areas support dense human populations, with the prevalence of poverty and food insecurity, causing low and unstable agricultural productivity, driven by several abiotic stresses—floods in the wet season, soil salinization in the dry season, acidity, and high organic matter and nutritional toxicities or deficiencies throughout the year. Despite these challenges, these areas hold considerable opportunities for food production, though they still remain highly underutilized. Agriculture and aquaculture dominate the livelihood options in coastal tropical zones. Promising technologies together with access to knowledge had evolved considerably in the recent past, with packages of relevant technologies available to maximize the use of these areas. Major investments in infrastructure to control floods and salt intrusion demonstrated positive impacts in some areas, but this entails proper planning and policies for monitoring and adjustments, and large capital investments, beyond the reach of smallholder farmers. High rainfall during the wet season causes excessive wetting, positioning rice farming as the preferred agricultural activity. Several rice varieties with tolerance to salinity and floods or a combination of both have been developed and some deployed in affected areas over the past two decades, with remarkable impacts. These varieties provided opportunities for designing better stress- and variety-specific management options and more confidence and assurance for farmers to invest in input use and good crop husbandry, besides flexibility for higher cropping intensity and diversity to enhance their nutrition and household income. More efforts, however, are needed to fully exploit the potentials of these areas for food and nutrition security through large-scale adoption of validated technologies, human and infrastructure development, enabling and empowering policies, along with concomitant access to information via digital tools and to markets. Enhancing the productivity and profitability of rice-based cropping systems in these coastal areas with assured quality management services through proper harvest, postharvest processing, and value addition will significantly improve smallholder farmers’ livelihood, thereby contributing to national food security and to reach several of the targets of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals