The fallacy of expecting results validated in the context of research stations, to perform well on widely different farmers’ field conditions was rarely taken seriously. Results of formal R&D, instead of being perceiving as a tool to find site specific solutions by further adaptive R&D, were considered as ready made final solutions meant for ad verbatim implementation. There are always a few farmers, who still know the value of adaptive work, and they are the ones who form that small number of farmers who are successful. For most of the other farmers, the very cardinal component of agricultural activity - adaptive R&D - has got divorced from the core activity, leading to its inevitable decline and the consequent need for what we call “R&D by People’s Participation in agriculture”, when it is, in fact, synonymous with agriculture itself.

Farmer’s lead role

Many Non-Government Organisations took up the issue and gave further shape to the slogan of R&D with People’s Participation. It was held that under prevailing system, farmers less privileged with natural resources are nowhere on the agenda of formal research, and they have no alternative but to identify their problems for themselves and their solutions too, by exchanging information regularly amongst fellow farmers in the same boat.

This concept metamorphosed into several models in the late 1990s including applications for even Genetically Modified crops and has come to stay as a distinct school of thought in policy planning in agriculture.

An advanced version includes an outsider but from within the farming community, to act as an intermediary and identify innovations in formal research that were suitable for adaptation and to bring such innovations to the farmers. The mediator also roped in formal institutions, researchers and research institutions, influenced their decision making processes and urged them to take up R&D problems that need lab research.

In this model, unlike the linear model of R&D, the farmers decides what they want and develop their own methods and refer only those portions to formal researchers which need access to formal lab structure to devise solutions. The farmers, from various solutions presented by researchers, will choose what suits to them for adaptation.

Changing perceptions

Many variations of the concept of people’s participation in R&D evolved, which are now collectively referred to as Participatory Technology Development (PTD).

Formal research has also woken up to the folly of the unidirectional work done by them so far. ICRISAT regularly invites farmers to visit their germplasm plots and takes the views of the farmers on which parents should be selected for breeding or which hybrids or selections are released for cultivation. The All India Co-ordinated Project on Research on Sugarcane has promoted the concept of “Frontline Demonstrations” which are farmer’s plots on technologies, which have great promise and are at present in developmental stage. International R&D funding too has now tilted more in favour of supporting projects on unconventional crops left outside the scope of the Green Revolution.

Practicing correct concepts

The need is to unite the R&D component once again with mainstream agricultural activities. To begin with there is no conflict of interests between “low external input agriculture” and “high external input agriculture”. Wherever natural availability of resources itself is low, such as low rainfall, low fertility soils, wastelands etc., there is no alternative to low external input agriculture. Wherever availability of natural resources is very favourable and plentiful, holding back induction of “high external inputs” will mean a waste of the potential productivity of the rare and valuable natural resources by mismanagement / under utilization.

R&D by People’s Participation in agriculture, championed as a cause by activists, was synonymous to agriculture at the dawn of history of agriculture and continues to be so even today.

The author is a consulting biotechnologist