Dr Vishav Vir Singh Jamwal
Indian agricultural policy, since green revolution has turned India from consumer to food producer and exporter since, past half century. Despite overall growth in Indian agriculture, farmer’s income has declined considerably. Increasing poverty among farm house holds has created serious agrarian distress in our country, with rise in farmer suicides mainly, due to debt on farmers because of high input cost incurred on expensive chemicals and relatively low returns from produce.
Excessive use of chemicals (especially broad spectrum pesticides) have not only caused severe environmental and ground water pollution (some parts even reported cancer, mainly Punjab state) but also have escalated the cost of cultivation, decreased the chances of profitable returns, raised the problem of resistance both in house hold as well as agricultural pests (e.g. Spodoptera resistance to BHC reported in 1965) and reduced the natural population of beneficial insects as well as natural enemies (predators, parasitoids, entomo-pathogens) which co-exist with the insect pests. This has led to secondary pest outbreaks (recent example, “white fly invasion on cotton” in 2015, Punjab). Many nations, including India have been forced to ban or restrict usage of various pesticides like DDT, Carbaryl, etc. due to these ill effects. Since then the concept of IPM (Integrated Pest Management) has gained importance in our country, which witnessed a paradigm shift from conventional to IPM based agriculture in recent years.
The agenda of doubling farmer’s income in India by 2022-23 has suddenly become a hot topic of discussions in both print and electronic media when our Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his address to a Kissan rally in U.P. on 28th February 2016 mentioned about his dream to see Indian farmers double their income by the year 2022-23 from current base year 2015-16 in a span of seven years, when India celebrates her 75th Independence year. To achieve this ambitious goal, IPM can play a pioneering role. Usually in IPM, a multi-pronged strategy is followed at a time for long term prevention of economic damage done by the pests with main focus on ecosystem. In addition, only less hazardous selective pesticides are used which mainly suppress the target organism but are relatively safe to others.
Main principle behind IPM is not to eradicate, but suppress the pest population below economic threshold levels in order to provide refugia for simultaneous growth of its natural enemies, thereof. Multiple techniques like monitoring, regulatory, cultural, physical, mechanical, biological, chemical and habitat management are utilized for this purpose. Monitoring being of utmost importance, as it notifies us about the arrival time of pest in crop field, its biology, nature of damage, its damaging life-stages, time and type of control measure to be adopted for its profitable management. This is followed by scouting wherein many life stages of the pest are destructed manually. Pests could also be killed by aggregating and trapping them on more attractive trap crops sown within or alongside of main crop. Numerous cost effective traps could also be used for this purpose in order to further decrease the input cost.
The idea is to initially generate viable information, plan, reduce the input cost and avoid any unnecessary expenditure. Many alternative, low cost control measures if adopted could further decrease overall cost and suppress pest population such as, attracting the predatory birds and spiders to crop fields by providing them proper shelter and favourable environment. It could be followed by augmentative and/or in-undative release of egg/larval parasitoids for early suppression of pest population, resulting into enhanced production. Further, botanical pesticides (plant extracts such as pyrethrum, neem, rotenone, etc.) obtained from naturally growing plant hosts have emerged as a prime, low cost, environment friendly, alternative for crop protection. Moreover, use of resistant cultivars suitable to local conditions and manipulations in sowing time of crop can further pressurize pest population by reducing their multiplication rate and subsequent damage to crop. Such pests could be easily managed even at low doses of selective chemical pesticides. This leads to strict usage of pesticides as per established guidelines and could provide sure shot capital gains to the farmer.
Surely, the IPM modules differ with region to region & pest to pest. Also, their rate of success in increasing/doubling the farmers’ income by 2022 would depend strictly on indigenous knowledge of cropping system, local pest problem and its large scale management. This could be possible only if local research is encouraged and exchange of knowledge takes place between the farmers and Government field functionaries. In India the process of wide spread testing, validation and recommendation of various location specific IPM modules has been initiated by ICAR in many crops. Their pain staking hard work for years have yielded many success stories with promising results. Citing the one in which, comparison between IPM and farmer practice field of cotton in Maharashtra was done. There, not only the input cost of the IPM field was reduced to half as compared to the farmer’s practices, but also doubled its monetary gains, clearly indicating the potential of IPM in doubling the farmer’s income.
Another example of successful IPM program is Basmati rice grown in different locations of India, where IPM farmers obtained almost double the benefit cost ratio and received higher prices for their produce compared to conventional. Such promising results emerged only due to active farmer participation, especially farm women, quick dissemination of technology and timely supply of inputs due to co-operation of developmental agencies. IPM is gaining importance in India as recently, many developed countries have restricted the trade of some agricultural commodities of India after complaints of high pesticide residues. This issue could only be addressed through IPM with judicious cum need based usage of pesticides.
Indian sub-continent at present juncture is under pressure to produce more food for rising population, raise farmer’s income and tackle the problems aroused of pesticide pollution, but if compared globally the overall chemicals consumption in India is quite low except few regions. Hence, we could not only provide excellent opportunities in area of multi-disciplinary basic research but also have rich value added applied knowledge for countrywide IPM implementation. In conclusion, IPM definitely has the potential to double farmer’s income, provide “food for all” and “health for all” only if it’s widely adopted throughout India in its true spirit and alongside the family planning programme is strictly pursued to keep Indian population well within reasonable limits.
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