Climate-smart agriculture

Story hook

It is the morning of 2 February 2019, in the Lok Sabha. Finance Minister Piyush Goyal, presenting the interim Budget for FY 2019-20, makes a curious announcement: India will adopt Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) at scale. The phrase, until then known to only a niche circle of agricultural economists, becomes a national policy term. The man behind ZBNF — Subhash Palekar, a 70-year-old Padma Shri awardee from Vidarbha — is suddenly cited in Parliament, Niti Aayog reports, and international FAO conferences.

But ZBNF's most ambitious deployment had already begun two years earlier in Andhra Pradesh. Then-Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu had hired Vijay Kumar T. — a no-nonsense IAS officer with experience in Self- Help Groups — to roll out Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS): a state- wide farmer empowerment programme that would transition 8 million farmers across 6 million hectares to Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming (APCNF) by 2024. Five years on, 6 lakh farmers across 1.8 lakh villages were practising natural farming in AP. The 2022 evaluation by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture found input costs had dropped by 45-60%, soil organic carbon had risen from 0.3% to 0.5-0.7%, and water requirement had fallen by 35%.

At the same time, the 2024 IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report had a stark warning for India: wheat yields would fall 6-23% by 2050 and rice yields 4-15% without climate adaptation. The Green Revolution package — high-yielding seeds + chemical fertiliser + canal water — that had averted famine in the 1960s was hitting environmental limits: groundwater table in Punjab falling 50 cm/year; soil organic carbon below 0.5% in 41% of Indian soils; nitrogen-use efficiency at 30% (meaning 70% of fertiliser is lost to soil, water, atmosphere).

Climate-smart agriculture, ZBNF, agroecology — these are not romantic returns to the pre-Green Revolution past. They are pragmatic adaptations designed for a 1.5°C-2°C warmer India where the monsoon is more erratic and groundwater is depleting. For UPSC, this is GS-III at its most contemporary.

Why this matters for UPSC

Climate-smart agriculture is at the intersection of two major Mains themes — sustainable agriculture (asked 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024) and climate-change adaptation (asked annually). Prelims tests specific schemes (PKVY, BPKP, MOVCDNER, ZBNF), techniques (mulching, jeevamruta, beejamruta), and bodies (ICAR-NAARM, NABARD, NCONF). Interview boards probe "does ZBNF scale?" and "is natural farming compatible with food security?".