Tripura is a small State in the North-East of our country that has made excellent progress in agriculture largely because it is endowed with high political stability and vision, and also a high degree of administrative efficiency. As far as agriculture is concerned, the land is undulating with some hill areas, some low-lying areas and so on. For that reason, many more crops are grown, including wheat, rice, maize and, also potato and many other crops are grown by farmers, depending on their own needs and the market needs.

There are four or five areas in which Tripura has to concentrate a little more in the coming years in order to ensure that sustainable food security, sustainable progress, and sustainable agriculture are all achieved. The first is conservation farming. Conservation farming involves conservation of land, water, biodiversity, and, at the same time, conservation for higher productivity. In other words, it is what I have been calling an “evergreen revolution” – higher productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm. So that is the first point for Tripura – taking up conservation farming more and more and making farmers conscious of the fact that the land is limited and is shrinking for agriculture. I am sure that farmers will be very receptive in terms of taking to conservation farming.

The other aspect of Tripura’s agriculture is the predominance of youth. This is true not only of Tripura but of the whole of India. We have a very large number of young people living in rural India whose vocation needs to be agriculture, but who are often disillusioned with agriculture and try to take other jobs. There are also a large number of workers taken jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGA, as it is popularly called). What we should do is to ensure that young people are enabled to take to new technologies. New technologies including new agricultural implements, new agricultural machinery, improved post-harvest technology and the whole area of value addition to primary products, or biomass utilisation. So training opportunities and information technology are exceedingly important. Young people can establish village information centres or village knowledge centres. How do you attract youth to agriculture? In order to attract youth and retain them in agriculture, agriculture should be made more economically rewarding and intellectually stimulating. Intellectual stimulation will come when we have new technologies, including biofertilizers, biopesticides, and the elements of what I call “biological software for sustainable agriculture”.

The third area is the very important role of women in agriculture. While everywhere in our country, more than 50 per cent of farm jobs are done by women, in Tripura and the North East, women play an even greater role. Women play a role in all aspects of agriculture, from production, processing, and marketing. They are involved in conservation, cultivation, consumption, and commerce. Women often have a handicap. They have no patta or title to land, and unless they have title to the land, credit is not available. Further, institutional mechanisms like self-help groups to give the power of scale are yet to be organised in a big way. Women in agriculture require much greater attention. Their time is valuable; they are over worked and underpaid. We should ensure that they have the necessary implements and machinery to ensure that they do not have to do a lot of physical work, since they also have work at home-making and child-rearing. We should promote more technologies for women in agriculture.

The next area is nutrition security. In spite of its progress in agriculture, there is still a lot of malnutrition in Tripura, particularly, child malnutrition and malnutrition among women. Malnutrition is of three kinds. The first is, inadequate consumption of calories. The second comes from inadequate consumption of proteins, such as pulses. Tripura grows a lot of pulses but must consume more. The third comes from inadequate availability of micronutrients like iron, iodine, Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, and so on. We have to ensure that micronutrient deficiencies that can lead to hidden hunger are eliminated. This can be done by helping farmers grow more genetic gardens or bio-fortified crops. There are naturally occurring bio-fortified crops such as sweet potato, moringa or drumstick, and many other plants. Farmers, particularly farm women, should be helped to establish genetic gardens and grow bio-fortified crops.

Finally, our Finance Minister has been saying that we must double the incomes of our farmers within five years. Income orientation to farming is what we recommended in the Report of the National Commission on Farmers. After all, farmers also require money not only for food but also for other purposes, for the education of children, for healthcare, for insurance, and so on. How do we ensure more income to farmers? This can be done only by bio-mass utilisation, establishing pulses bio-parks, setting up rice bio-parks, where every part of the plant can be utilised for value addition where straw, bran, husk, hull, all can be used. Further, by increasing productivity, there will be more marketable surplus for farmers, and marketable surplus provides an opportunity to earn a little more income.

I started by emphasising on conservation farming, and went on to stress the role of young people and women. Nutrition security is different from food security. Food security is usually the consumption of necessary calories and that can be done if the Food Security Act is implemented effectively and all those who are entitled to five kilograms of rice, wheat, jowar, bajra or any other grain which they prefer, receive it at the right time.

I would like to suggest that we train the local panchayats or women in specific localities as community hunger fighters. The MS Swaminathan Research Foundation has a syllabus for training community hunger fighters. These community hunger fighters shall be well trained in all aspects of nutrition security.

Tripura has made a lot of progress, impressive progress. As I said earlier, political vision and political stability have helped Tripura to make progress, but the best is yet to come. And, we should now, in the next five years transform Tripura’s agriculture in such a way that young people find it technologically interesting and economically rewarding. Similarly, the women should be freed of an excessive burden of work and be given opportunities to utilise modern technology, including information technology. Information technology is important for ensuring that farmers have the right information at the right time at the right place on the monsoon and the market. The monsoon and the market are two of the major determinants of a farmer’s well-being and, both can be predicted today by mean of information technology.

I wish Tripura a glorious future in agriculture. A lot of work has to be done, but where there are challenges, there are also opportunities. I am sure that the Tripura administration will develop a plan for agriculture progress that means economic progress of rural areas of Tripura and the food security of the people of Tripura. Let every person born in Tripura have an opportunity to lead the productive and a healthy life that comes from adequate nutrition.

This is the transcript of a talk delivered by Dr M. S. Swaminathan at the consultation on “Results from Village Surveys in Tripura” on March 18, 2017.