Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam www.abdulkalam.com
Address at the 9th Annual Convocation of Anand Agricultural University, Anand, GJ
26th February 2013
Sustained Agriculture Productivity
It is not the subsidy what the farmers want, the farmer needs right type of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides at right time and at right source.
I am delighted to participate in the 9th Convocation of the Anand Agricultural University, Anand. My greeting to the Vice Chancellor, Vice Chancellors of other universities, members of Board of Management and Academic Council; Deans of various faculties, faculty members, distinguished guests, dear students.
I am happy to note that the university has distinguished itself as a pre-eminent institution for agro-technological study. AAU is also giving high priority to research with the focus productivity, sustainability and improvement of socio-economic conditions of farming community. I am impressed that AAU has a brand for seed production with the name Anubhav seeds with the supply of quality and truthful seeds. I congratulate all the students who are graduating today and also the faculty for shaping the young minds.
Friends, it has been found that entrepreneurship plays a crucial role in the development and well-being of the society, as it
creates jobs, drives and shapes innovation and promotes competition which in-turn improves productivity. Agricultural productivity can grow and enrich our farmers only through integrated rural development involving agriculture and non- agricultural growth along with societal mission. Keeping this aspect in mind, I would like to share few thoughts on the topic
“Sustained agriculture productivity”.
Cooperative movement in agriculture
Friends, today, one of the major problems in the field of agriculture is; small size land holding by farmers which is continuously getting fragmented due to our family structure. Under these circumstances only solution for increasing the productivity is to create a positive farmer cooperative movement in our rural sector which will bring together small farmers facilitating mechanized farming, silo storage, value addition, and marketing of agro- products. Fortunately, Gujarat has a tremendous experience in cooperative movement in production of milk products.
I have come across situations where, farmer’s production increasing in vegetables and fruits, and all MSP supported crops is met with market crashes and failures. Dear agriculture experts, please tell me what efforts you have made to prevent farmers distress sale? The solution is a farmer’s cooperative movement.
When the farmer’s production increases, these cooperatives will forecast and establish networks with markets on behalf of the
individual farmer members to facilitate rapid movement where there is a demand and profit cost. Also, the entrepreneurs should plan for diversification and value addition of the product needed by various sections of the society.
Recently, during my visit to a multi-national company at Hyderabad, I saw hybrid variety of corn seed that has increased the productivity many a times. With this background, I would suggest AAU can give priority agriculture education and training with syllabus of cooperative farming and entrepreneurship.
I have found that for sustainable development system to be established in our rural complexes, we need PURA – Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas, which envisages four types of connectivity, namely; physical, electronic and knowledge connectivity leading to economic connectivity of the complex. Such PURA is driven by rural entrepreneurship and becomes a growth centre for the entire region.
Today, about 700 million in India are living in villages, and hence any mission towards prosperity has to be inclusive of the rural regions. As a logical step, we have to address, how the sustainable development of villages can be achieved.
The development of six hundred thousand villages is vital for developed India. The foundation for sustainable development of rural areas is PURA which means Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas. If we take up PURA as a mission, we can make villages as prosperous knowledge accumulation centers and villagers as
entrepreneurs. The missions for prosperity can be achieved only through the spreading of the missions on the basis of core competence to the village clusters and cooperative movements.
Components of sustainable development
Dear friends, I would like to discuss on what constitutes sustainable development. Sustainable development means, integrated thoughts and actions which not only lead to financially robust systems but also keenly focus on societal development, environmental conservation, technological infusion and employment creation. In the context of the rural India, it would mean the evolution of socio-economic entities which transform the means of livelihood and quality of life for 800 million rural citizens with a customized and adaptable action plan which follows the route of citizen empowerment and capacity building. It would also enable building of a society whose fabric is strongly bounded by a value system of harmony, respect for diversity, and care for the environment. Sustainable development would have to emerge as systems of collective learning and continuous improvement to ensure that the products and services keep evolving to higher levels and progressively better income generation opportunities are locally available. Friends, when we discuss today about the opportunities and challenges of sustainable development like PURA, we should keep all these aspects in mind.
The mission of PURA, apart from concentrating on reinforcing agriculture, will emphasize on agro processing, development of rural craftsmanship, dairy, fishing and fish processing, silk production, so that the non-farm revenue for the rural sector is enhanced, based on the core competence of the region. Also the rural economy will be driven by renewable energy such as solar, wind, bio-fuel and conversion of municipal waste and forest waste material into power.
This is where a region specific business model is required to be made by the PURA entrepreneur. In this approach, the task is to make sustainable development using the core competence of the rural sector.
In the past, government, private and public sectors have been taking up rural development in parts. For example, starting an education institution, starting a healthcare centers, laying roads, building houses, building a marketing complex, giving a communication link in a particular rural area have been taken up in the past as individual activities. During the last few decades, it is our experience that these initiatives starts well, just like heavy rain resulting into multiple streams of water flow. As soon as the rain stops, few days later all the streams get dried up because there is no water body to collect the surplus water and store it at the right place. In similar way, any governmental and NGO action – one single activity, example; a school or an additional road, as soon as governmental or NGO support is withdrawn, the existence of the school or the road will vanish. For the first time, PURA envisages an
integrated development plan with employment generation as the focus, driven by provision of the habitat, healthcare, education, skill development, physical and electronic connectivity and marketing as a business proposition in a sustainable manner.
Let me discuss briefly the model of a typical PURA.
PURA: connectivities which lead to it
PURA essentially requires four levels of connectivity which have to be customized according to local competencies and needs. It means that:
1. The villages must be connected with in themselves and with main towns and metros through by good roads and wherever needed by railway lines. They must have other infrastructure like schools, colleges, hospitals and amenities for the local population and the visitors. This is physical connectivity.
2. In the emerging knowledge era, the native knowledge has to be preserved and enhanced with latest tools of technology, training and research. The villages have to have access to good education from best teachers wherever they are, must have the benefit of good medical treatment, and must have latest information on their pursuits like agriculture, fishery, horticulture and food processing. That means they have to have electronic connectivity.
3. Once the Physical and Electronic connectivity are enabled, the knowledge connectivity is enabled. That can facilitate the
ability increase the productivity, the utilization of spare time, awareness of health welfare, ensuring a market for products, increasing quality conscience, interacting with partners, getting the best equipment, increasing transparency and so in general knowledge connectivity, that progresses core competence of the rural environment with additional to technology. Hence, these three connectivities integrated way lead to economic connectivity.
4. Once the three connectivities viz Physical, Electronic and knowledge connectivity are ensured, they facilitate earning capacity leading to economic connectivity. When we Provide Urban Amenities to Rural Areas (PURA), we can lead to up- liftment of rural areas, we can attract investors, we can introduce effectively useful systems like Rural BPOs, Micro and small-scale industries.
The number of PURA for the whole country is estimated to be 7000 covering 600,000 villages where 600 million people live. There are number operational PURA in our country initiated by many educational, healthcare institutions, industry and other institutions. Government of India is already moving ahead with the implementation of PURA on the national scale across several districts of India. Now all these examples of rural development through PURA along with international experience have taken the form of a book, titled Target 3 Billion.
Typical Working PURAs
It is possible to get an insight of PURA by studying few of the operational PURAs which are functioning in different parts of the country. They are: Periyar PURA, Loni PURA, Chitrakoot PURA, Meenakshi PURA and Warana PURA. Let me highlight few aspects of Warana PURA.
Warana PURA: Farmer cooperative in action
Friends, in March 2010 I was in the Warana valley of Kolhapur district where I interacted with many students, farmers, milk producers, rural entrepreneurs and villagers and also inaugurated a PURA center at the Tatyasaheb Institute of Engineering and Technology.
The Warana PURA mission began as a sugar cooperative movement, as a vision of a great social leader called Sah-kaar-shri Tatyasaheb Kore in 1950s to transform the Warana region which was a backward area infested with unlawful activities. The Warana PURA has since then evolved on a cooperative framework and implemented sustainable models based on the core competencies of the rural areas covering 69 villages and about 4 lakh people. This PURA model, which has more than 60,000 farmers, women entrepreneurs and villagers as their members, has been giving consistent dividend of over 25% per annum to all the cooperative society members.
The Warana PURA programme has succeeded in creating income generation through value addition to sugar and dairy
products, innovative agricultural practices and entrepreneurship, striving towards literacy and healthcare for all. The Warana cooperative sugar factory with about 20,000 farmers as its members, has also taken area development as one of its missions and has helped construction of schools, medi-care institutions and libraries. There has been significant effort to upgrade technology and practices, which has reflected in the consistently high sugar recovery rate of more than 12% which is almost 1/5th higher than the national average.
For the welfare of landless villagers, Tatyasaheb Kore envisioned and pioneered the creation of the Warana Poultry and Warana Dairy. Warana Cooperative Dairy with more than 16000 milk producers spread over 60 villages, collects and processes more than 500,000 liters of milk every day from it 1753 collection centers. With advanced technologies for value addition and maintaining highest quality standards, the Warana Dairy manufactures and exports many value added products of milk to Middle East.
Enhanced income led to better living standards to the rural people of the Warana region the Warana PURA complex evolved innovative models in the service and retail sector in the form of Warana Bazar with its 58 stores.
Warana cooperative has provided to its youth a wide spectrum of education to empower themselves and take the vision of the Warana development further. Similarly, the health for the citizen’s
is supported by initiatives such as the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital and the Dental College. To inculcate a spirit of saving the Warana PURA complex also started the Warana Cooperative Bank in 1966, which has now more than 18,000 cooperative members and has 24 branches across the Warana valley.
While I was in Warana I also visited the Warana Sugar Parliament, which is a mark of the empowerment in a democratic framework which the Warana PURA complex has provided to the farmers. I was impressed to see the building which closely resembled the Indian Parliament, echoing the message of Shri Tatyasaheb Kore which reverberates the faith in democratic, economic, social and educational empowerment of the grass-root level rural population.
Today, Warana is remarkable region which, by following a socio-economic objective in mind has transformed into a rural region with almost none living below poverty line. Now Warana area is thinking in terms of becoming a Carbon neutral PURA by the year 2015. The Warana PURA complex has a message that innovative missions, with focus on better technology and sound management, can fulfill the socio-economic objectives of creating a prosperous and happy society emanating from the bottom of the pyramid.
Now let me present a platform which is a unique enterprise driven model of sustainable welfare model through the idea of a PURA Activated. The essence of PURA Activated is the belief that PURA enterprises of next generation, need to think of its
relationship workforce as beyond being the provider of mere livelihood.
The PURA Activated envisages in the overall, integrated development of the rural population in the PURA Complex.
Moreover, it has the vision of sustainable socio-business models which are as a vertically integrated network of multiple entrepreneurs, who share synergies and provide for value addition to each other, leading to overall benefit of all the stakeholders.
The PURA Activated has two kinds of entrepreneurs –
1) Resource Entrepreneurs: They will focus on the economic realization of the natural, traditional and human resources with the help of customized technology and modern management for enhancing the income level for every household.
2) Social Entrepreneurs: The next category of entrepreneurs, will work closely with the resource entrepreneurs. They would focus on improving the human development index, in terms of education, healthcare and improvement of standards of living by provision of amenities and equity across various diversities.
The entrepreneurs of PURA Activated, would work in close synchronization and integration with the help of local PURA champions – who may be institutions or organizations of repute.
They will be partners with the government, local administration and Panchayati Raj (village governance institutions). The enterprise
network of PURA Activated has to be evolved with the technical collaboration from a multi-dimensional array of technological and managerial institutions. Similarly, enterprises from different parts of the world can be partners to the PURA Activated by acting as equity investors, exploring and facilitating market linkages and providing a technological platform the best practices and innovative solutions to production challenges can strengthen the socio- economic rural complexes for the 600,000 villages in India.
Research Missions for Anand Agricultural University
Certain research areas have been identified for agriculture sector. Anand Agriculture University may like to consider taking it as a mission mode programme involving R & D agencies, agricultural universities, industry, farmers and the government.
1. In many areas of the nation it has been found that the soil is deficient in micro nutrients such as zinc, boron and sulphur.
There is a need to map this deficiency in different areas and bridge the gap through balanced fertilization demonstrated on large farms and the multi-cropping system.
2. Providing improved quality seed varieties, matching the soil condition and climate variability. The quality seeds have to be made available to the farmers to buy at the right time.
3. Forecasting to the farmers correctly at the right time, the monsoon arrival and also the monsoon performance. Right input to the farmers accordingly should be available.
4. Promoting appropriate land and water management practices for alleviating water logging and simultaneously harvesting water for subsequent supplemental irrigation. Farmers and agriculture scientists have to work together.
5. Capacity building among stakeholders through training, skill development and online problem solving and knowledge sharing through agri-clinics at block level.
6. Arranging efficient processing of produce which can result in a value addition of 4 to 5 time and increase shelf life.
Cooperative farming can be introduced, particularly small land holding farmers, so that the seeding to the harvest marketing can be made more efficient.
7. We need research on nutrition of aspect of food and create a plant, or farm mix which leads of efficient nutrition in the food produce.
8. My farmer friends tell me, that one of the key research and development area which they need is in the field of agro economics and development of proper markets for farm produce. I would also suggest research areas may include issues like forward pricing, breaking the monopoly and cartelization of purchasers, fixing of spot prices before delivery and a market where the farmer has choices on whom to sell.
Conclusion
India has to now embark upon the Second Green Revolution which will enable it to further increase its productivity in the agricultural sector. By 2020 India would require producing over 340 million tonnes in view of population growth and increased purchasing power. The increase in the production would have to surmount many impeding factors. The requirement of land for the increasing population as well as for greater afforestation and environmental preservation activities would force a situation whereby the present 170 million hectares of arable land would not be fully available. It might shrink to 100 million hectares by 2020.
In addition, there will be shortage of water due to competing demands and reduction in the agricultural work force. Our agricultural scientists and technologists in partnership with multiple organizations, have to work for enhancing the average productivity more than 3 times in the available land. The type of technologies needed would be in the areas of development of seeds that would ensure high yield varieties even under constraints of water and land.
The second green revolution is indeed a knowledge graduation from characterization of soil to the matching of the seed with the composition of the fertilizer, water management and evolving pre- harvesting techniques for such conditions. The domain of a farmer’s work would enlarge from grain production to food processing and marketing through cooperatives. While doing so, utmost care would have to be taken for various environmental and people related aspects leading to sustainable development.
My greetings to all the graduating students from Anand Agricultural University for success in their mission for working towards sustained agriculture productivity enhancement.
May God bless you.
