The ‘crisis' discourse that has come to dominate discussions on Indian agriculture leads one to often overlook some bright spots in an otherwise dismal landscape. Two success stories that come immediately to mind are cotton and maize (corn), which have both registered impressive production increases in recent times. Between 2002-03 and 2010-11, India's cotton output jumped from 136 lakh bales to over 310 lakh bales, while in respect of corn, it almost doubled, from 11.15 million tonnes (mt) to 20.23 mt. The primary driver here has been technology — Bt transgenics in cotton and single-cross hybrids (SCH) in place of conventional open-pollinated varieties or composites for corn. The rapid diffusion of these technologies — to the extent of covering 90 per cent of the area under cotton and 30 per cent in corn — has helped raise average per-hectare yields in these two crops, from 300 kg to 500 kg and from 1.6-1.7 tonnes to 2.4-2.5 tonnes, respectively.
There are two points particularly worth taking note of in the above-mentioned yield breakthrough cases. The first is that the lead has come from the private sector — unlike in the past, when the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) was at the forefront of breeding the ‘magic' high-yielding varieties that gave us the Green Revolution. The second has to do with their timing, which could not have been better. Bt cotton came to India when production had fallen below even the 175-lakh-bale levels of the mid-1990s, turning the country into a net importer. It is now the world's No. 2 exporter behind the US, which has seen its own output decline by a fifth since 2005-06. Increased demand, from exporters as well as domestic textile mills, has enabled cotton growers to gain from both higher prices and yields, courtesy Bt: Last year, they netted upwards of Rs 40,000 an acre, on an average. Likewise for corn, where the adoption of SCH has coincided with growing consumption of eggs, meat and dairy products, fuelled by rising incomes. The resultant demand, including from exports of some 2.5 mt (mainly to South-East Asia, where India enjoys a freight advantage over the US or Argentina), has made corn (a feed-grain) costlier than wheat (a food-grain)!
The success achieved by private seed companies in cotton and corn — to a degree, also in hybrid rice and vegetables — holds clear lessons for ICAR and others. The latter suffer today not from a dearth of breeding and research expertise as much as a capacity to take these to the farmer. Pusa-1121, a publicly-bred basmati variety that fetches over $1 billion in export revenues, would have remained in the ICAR's fields but for the commercialisation initiative of a Delhi-based rice miller. More such public-private farm research partnerships are needed.