From farm ponds to AI chatbots: India's blueprint for revitalising dryland agriculture

Drylands are not defined by sudden disasters; their crisis unfolds quietly through declining soil fertility, uncertain rainfall, groundwater stress and repeated production shocks. This slow accumulation of vulnerability rarely attracts the attention commanded by floods or droughts, yet its economic consequences can be profound for farming households.Drylands cover nearly 47 per cent of the world's land surface, support more than two billion people, and account for over 40 per cent of cultivated land globally. In India, dryland covers60–68% of the net sown area and contributing 40–44% of total food-grain production, with substantial concentrations across the central, western and southern plateaus that contribute significantly to national production of millets, pulses and oilseeds.Historically constrained by water scarcity, dryland regions have increasingly diversified from low-value coarse grains towards pulses, oilseeds, horticulture and livestock. However, groundwater-led intensification has created serious sustainability risks, with water tables declining by 1–3 metres annually in some areas. Therefore, is not whether dryland agriculture can survive climate stress, but how it can remain productive and economically viable under conditions of persistent uncertainty.Six decades of institution-building and field-level experience offer an important lesson that the resilience is rarely created by a single technology or intervention but from a layered and mutually reinforcing system of measures. Collectively, these interventions provide an important basis for understanding climate-adaptive agricultural development, particularly in regions of the Global South facing comparable resource constraints.The evidence from successive droughtsThe evidence of successive droughts tells a compelling story of resilience. Comparing of food-grain production losses during drought years with those recorded in adjacent normal years reveals a striking shift: the depth of production decline has narrowed markedly, signalling that Indian agriculture is increasingly absorbing climatic shocks rather than simply succumbing to them. Losses of approximately 13 per cent in the drought year of 1987 fell to below 6 per cent in 2009 and to a negligible 0.22 per cent in 2014. During the same period, rainfed food-grain production increased from approximately 56 million tonnes to 130 million tonnes, representing a 133 per cent increase.Available analysis attributes this improvement primarily to system-level adaptation rather than to any single technological intervention. Under the National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture, vulnerability was assessed across 651 agricultural districts, and climate-resilient technologies were demonstrated in 448 villages across 151 vulnerable districts. In Rupana village of Sirsa district, Haryana, combinations of land levelling, farm ponds, stress-tolerant crops, integrated pest management and livestock nutrition improved cotton and milk yields.Genetic improvement has constituted an important component of this adaptation. Between 2014 and 2025, the national research network released nearly 3,000 crop varieties with tolerance to drought, heat and salinity. These included sorghum varieties characterised by rapid and deep-rooting systems, pearl millet lines capable of reaching maturity in slightly more than two months, and groundnut varieties selected for rooting depth and improved water-use efficiency. Comparable advances have been observed in livestock improvement, including the development of cattle lines with enhanced heat tolerance, disease resistance and performance under humid, disease-prone conditions.Productivity gains: rainfed vis-à-vis irrigatedIndia’s rainfed agriculture is increasingly narrowing the productivity gap with irrigation. Between 2000–01 and 2022–23, rainfed food-grain productivity more than doubled (107%), compared with only 33% growth under irrigation. Strong gains were also recorded in pulses (99%), oilseeds (97%) and rice (110%), alongside remarkable improvements in groundnut (157%) and chickpea (107%). These gains have strengthened the rainfed sector’s contribution to national production, particularly in pulses and chickpea, demonstrating that productivity growth need not be irrigation-dependent when appropriate technologies, crops, institutions and resource-management practices converge.Sequencing land and water before the cropIndia’s dryland experience offers a powerful lesson: resilience must be built from the ground up. For nearly five decades, evolved from drought-relief programmes of the 1970s to participatory ridge-to-valley approaches and, more recently, landscape-scale planning using GIS and remote sensing. The lesson is clear: water and land systems must be strengthened before crop-level interventions can deliver lasting gains.The same principle applies to solar irrigation. Nearly 1.4 million standalone and 3.5 million grid-connected pumps have been solarised, supported by subsidies of up to 60%. Yet cheaper, reliable energy can unintentionally accelerate groundwater depletion. Technology can solve one constraint while deepening another. Micro-irrigation, water accounting and groundwater governance must therefore accompany solarisation an essential lesson for water-stressed regions globally.Digital advisories and the aggregation of marketsDigital infrastructure represents an increasingly significant dimension of this transformation. A farmer-facing advisory platform currently serves over 2.75 crore registered farmers across more than 3.4 lakh villages, incorporates more than 600 government welfare schemes, and provides multilingual assistance through an AI chatbot handling upwards of 20,000 queries per day. Crop insurance payouts have crossed Rs 1.92 lakh crore, while a satellite-linked pest-surveillance system monitors 432 pests across 61 crops. During a recent kharif season, localised monsoon forecasts disseminated in five languages influenced sowing decisions among more than half of the 3.8 crore farmers reached.Market aggregation provides a further dimension of income enhancement. Evidence from a pulse-growing cluster indicates that smallholders participating in an integrated farmer-producer-organisation model earned close to Rs 41,500 per acre annually, compared with approximately Rs 22,000 among farmers marketing individually. The resulting income differential of nearly 89 per cent has been associated with pooled bargaining power, on-site processing and direct market linkages with institutional buyers, including school meal programmes.Evidence at the village levelEvidence from the village level provides important empirical support for the broader national trends. In Tumkur, Karnataka, a cluster comprising farm ponds, desilted community tanks and renovated check dams recharged over 44 crore litres of water, extended irrigation availability during dry spells, and increased returns from cashew, amla and tamarind relative to traditional finger-millet and groundnut cultivation.Separately, a resilience assessment covering more than 5,000 farmers across 15 states documented outcomes ranging from partial protection, with drought-year yields reaching approximately two-thirds of normal-year levels, to cases in which intervention villages exceeded normal-year yields even during drought. These findings indicate substantial variation in outcomes according to soil characteristics and local intervention design, rather than supporting a uniform model of application.India was an early mover with its National Agroforestry Policy in 2014. Since then, an estimated 17 million hectares of dryland have been integrated into tree–crop–livestock systems through watershed initiatives. These diversified systems can deliver higher benefit–cost returns than conventional monocropping, while enhancing carbon sequestration, ecological stability and livelihoods demonstrating that dryland resilience is strongest when productivity and ecology are designed together.The limits of replicationThe evidence also indicates important limitations to direct replication but strongly supports adapting its principles. Institutional continuity, watershed-first sequencing and smallholder aggregation offer transferable foundations; crop varieties, subsidy designs and water-governance systems must be tailored to local agroecological, socioeconomic and institutional realities. . The opportunity now is to move from replication to intelligent adaptation. India, with regional and international research partners, can pilot proven elements across dryland regions of Africa and South Asia. Development Finance Institutions (DFI) can then help convert validated models into investable, landscape-scale programmes, enabling promising local solutions to move beyond pilots and deliver resilience at scale..India’s dryland experience does not represent a problem solved, but a challenge made progressively manageable. It demonstrates that sustained institutional investment, cumulative technological progress and context-specific resource management can turn persistent vulnerability into resilience. The next frontier, however, is not another standalone technology. It is precision in deploying what already worked while matching interventions to the unique biophysical, socioeconomic and institutional realities of each landscape.The future of dryland agriculture will depend on moving from generic solutions to spatially intelligent, locally tailored strategies. The goal is simple but transformative: every dryland landscape should receive the right intervention, at the right scale, at the right time. Dr. M. L. Jat is Secretary, DARE & Director General and Dr. Naveen P. Singh is Assistant Director General, ICAR, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Views expressed are personal.(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)

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