PTD for Sustainable Dryland Agriculture in South India

This paper is about collaborative action between institutions and individuals in South India, seeking to develop people-centred approaches to promote sustainable dryland agriculture and sustainable livelihoods of the rural poor. Participatory Technology Development (PTD) is an important component of this approach. The South Indian context is characterised by a marginal and degrading resource base, high population pressure and a high density of institutions that play a role in promoting sustainable land use. This creates a peculiar context for PTD as an approach: the institutional climate is favourable, but small and marginal farmers have to survive on the edge: their physical and economic margins for experimentation are narrow and decreasing.

AME is an independent support organisation, which has been a prime mover of sustainable and ecologically sound agriculture in South India since the mid 1980s. AME developed an approach to concerted stakeholder action, with PTD as ‘entry strategy’. The initial focus is on field-level guidance to farmers and NGO field staff. We then start working ‘upwards’ by feeding the lessons learnt in PTD processes into the formal information systems of research institutions and the Ministry of Agriculture. We work ‘sidewards’ by facilitating the formation of stakeholder platforms of farmers, NGOs, researchers and Departments of Agriculture; and ‘forwards and backwards’ by involving banking institutions, input suppliers, and processing and storage experts in these platforms.

A PTD process begins with the identification of entry-point problems, crops and institutions. We start experiments with a few groups, on single crops. Over a period of 3–4 years, the approach broadens and deepens, from single crops to integrated farming systems, and from single groups to farmers’ federations. Village-level institutions, mainly Farmers Help Groups, form the main launching pad for PTD experimentation and for scaling up PTD-proven technologies.

Women increasingly manage agriculture in dryland areas. In 1996 about 30% of farmers involved in PTD processes were women, in 2000 65% were women. But is that the same as gender mainstreaming? No. Women still face important constraints when it comes to control over resources and institutional gender bias. On the other hand, once women are involved in PTD processes, their Self-Help Groups and Federations become very powerful instruments for scaling up sustainable and women-friendly technologies.

Comprehensive training support has been given to the organisations implementing PTD with farmers. In principle, AME engages in medium- to long-term associations with organisations, with a time perspective of at least three years. Support is specific to each organisation, depending on background and experience. AME works primarily with NGOs that are active members of larger networks, because this enhances the potential for scaling up. Training addresses social, technical, methodological and process aspects. NGOs are often more concerned with social than with technical issues. Therefore, importance is given to technical knowledge building in the PTD training curriculum.

Results and impact of PTD processes are multi-dimensional. Impact means spread of technologies and approaches, within one farm from one crop to another, from entry point to system level, then from farmer to farmer, from village to village, within and between organisations, and so on. In 1997 we started experimentation involving 270 farmers in two districts, in collaboration with 12 NGOs. By 2001 we were involved in PTD processes with 1900 farmers in 25 districts, with an estimated outreach to another 10,300 extension farmers who are exposed to the technologies tested through PTD and are encouraged to also try them. Eight NGO networks are involved, with in total about 180 member NGOs. An impact study gave insights into the way in which PTD-tested innovations spread. It was found that the spread was quicker when the crop was more profitable, the technology was simple, and crop-specific risks were low. Social cohesiveness of the group and the village also contributes positively to the extent of spread.

AME’s approach to institutionalisation walks on four legs:

Building an integrated area approach with the focus on strengthening the village-level institutions and their federations, ongoing capacity building of NGO networks, and the strategic functioning of the District-Level Working Committees, which consist of a cross-section of important stakeholders;
Establishing and consolidating Crop-based Working Groups which operate on the regional and, to some extent, the national level;
Strengthening the links with the state and national policy levels, through AME’s Steering Committee and also through policy advocacy;
Institutionalising AME itself.

We remain with a few questions. What are we scaling up? – the PTD process or the technologies that have been tested and proven in a PTD process? How far can PTD be scaled up without losing its essential characteristics? It would be realistic to aim at scaling up a more standardised, structured approach, which can be linked to PTD processes, but which builds on rather than institutionalises PTD itself. How far should we go in scaling up? When we go into the mode of stakeholder concerted action, lobbying and policy advocacy, we risk losing touch with field-level realities – and exactly being connected with them has been our strength. We need to evolve models of institutionalisation that can be replicated and taken further to scale by others. Can PTD become part of an alternative route to globalisation? The dryland farmers in South India are facing crashing farm-gate prices for almost every crop. Are there new niches for dryland farmers? These challenges we have begun to confront by looking, together with the farmers, for alternative cropping and marketing systems.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the farmers involved in our programmes for sharing their common sense, their wisdom and their sharp observations, and for making constant reality checks. We thank NGOs for their partnership and commitment and for their zeal to scale up – driving the message home to us that it is a moral obligation. We thank our researcher friends for their willingness to share, for being patient and in a constant learning mode, and all those others with whom we have been collaborating in one way or the other. Thanks go also to our own colleagues in AME who, all in their own way, have been involved in PTD implementation. We found our drivers to be keen observers, seeing often much faster than we which farmer is a serious PTD farmer and who is not.

In AME, there are those who work in the field and those who write. Through working on papers like this one, we learn to work together and to respect and appreciate each other. This paper was prepared by a two-person team – one of us with a deep involvement in and understanding of institutional processes in the field, the other a ‘participant observer’ with a policy focus. We thank IIRR and ETC Ecoculture for giving us this challenging opportunity to sit down together and write – and for the patience with which they have been waiting for this paper!

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Introduction

This paper is about collaborative action between institutions and individuals. It is about the development of people-centred approaches to promote sustainable dryland agriculture and sustainable livelihoods of the rural poor. We discuss and review joint programmes of AME, a support organisation, and partner organisations (NGOs, NGO networks, Departments of Agriculture, research institutions) implemented in the States of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in South India. We describe the role that PTD and complementary approaches have played in these programmes and the extent to which PTD processes and/or their outcomes have been scaled up and institutionalised over the past five years (1996-2001). During this period, concerted efforts were made to develop and strengthen PTD as an integral part of our approach. AME, however, has been a support programme in South India since 1986 and has been one of the pioneers in the field of promoting low-external-input and sustainable agriculture (LEISA). This history has helped AME to acquire the leverage required to be an effective intermediary organisation in this field.

We will address the process approach followed in training, field-level experimentation and stakeholder concerted action. We raise a number of strategic issues which we have come across in our work, but which – in our view – have a larger significance. In the final section, we synthesise our learning points regarding key components of institutionalisation.

This is an overview paper. It aims to give an overall picture of AME’s approach. As we are working in 25 districts in three states, within the rather vast mandate area of the Deccan Plateau, it is impossible to give all details. We could have chosen to present one case (which would have made life easier for us and perhaps for the reader), but we refrained from that temptation. As we are discussing scaling up and institutionalisation processes, we felt we should make an effort to show the whole, with glimpses (presented in boxes) into specific areas and processes. The ‘price’ we pay for presenting a broad overview is that we have to leave out many interesting details.

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The Context

This Fissured Land

Going to Scale in the Indian Context

AME: An Independent Support and Linkage Organisation

This Fissured Land

India occupies 2% of the earth’s surface but must feed 18% of the world’s human population.

Indians are confined to a land suffering from many kinds of resource depletion. Existing levels of disruption of energy and material cycles, which ultimately must be closed, cannot be sustained indefinitely. They are leading to a continuous depression of the productive potential of cultivated and non-cultivated land. The situation has been [temporarily] saved from serious disaster by the Green Revolution. However this has been restricted to only 20% of the land under cultivation. Serious disparities remain. There has been a significant expansion in the niche space for intensive agriculture as well as for resource processing and transport, information processing and resource usurpation. However this has been seriously offset by continuing contraction of niche space for subsistence [dryland] agriculture and for those depending on foraging for resources. These difficulties have been compounded by an over-all growth in numbers of people. The consequence has been a scrambling for resources and intense conflict, in the countryside and in the cities where people who have been driven out from elsewhere are flocking. [...] No longer functional entities in the present scenario of shrinking niche space, castes and communities are set up against each-other, with frighteningly high levels of communal and caste violence being the result. In India the ongoing struggle between the peasant and industrial modes of resource use has left in its wake a fissured land, ecologically and socially fragmented beyond belief and, to some observers, beyond repair. Where do we go from here?[1] (Gadgil & Guha 1993)

AME’s area of operation – the Deccan Plateau – is a chronically drought-prone region where overexploitation of the natural resource base is pervasive. The Deccan Plateau lies in the rain-shadow of the Western Ghats in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu States. Annual rainfall ranges from 500 to 900 mm. Rainfed farming is practised in 81% of this region, which was largely bypassed by the Green Revolution. New technologies have helped better-endowed pockets but this is offset by declining productivity in vast marginal areas (Jodha 1996). The area has a population of about 200 million people, and the livelihoods of more than half of them are (still) partly or totally dependent on dryland farming.

Figure 1: Map of Deccan Plateau with AME’s areas of operation

During the past 50 years, there has been a steady decrease in soil fertility in this region, water tables have fallen rapidly especially during the past 20 years and draught power has almost disappeared. There are increasing energy shortages, increasing stretches of fallow land and increased mechanisation, which has reduced opportunities for agricultural wage labour. An under-acknowledged but pervasive phenomenon is the increasing number of marginalised female-managed farm households as a consequence of (predominantly) male migration. Last but not least, traditional institutions, including the indigenous knowledge that forms part of them, are eroding quickly. Most recently, farmers in several areas are facing serious problems with crashing prices of agricultural products. This is partly attributable to the opening up of markets as a result of globalisation policies.

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Going to Scale in the Indian Context

First, we bring a few observations on the meaning of scaling up in the Indian context. The scale itself should be understood: the sheer size of the Indian subcontinent, the magnitude of its population, the pressing environmental issues, the complex institutional scenario with a Federal Government with layers and layers of bureaucracy and a comprehensive agricultural research set-up with over 200 agricultural research institutions and some 60 agricultural universities. The NGO sector is quite small compared to the government sector. Yet there are an estimated 60,000 NGOs in India and together they form a complex, colourful and diverse whole. And then the farmers: who are the Indian farmers? There are more than half a billion small-scale and marginal farmers and about a quarter of them are on the Deccan Plateau. They live under very diverse conditions, speak many different languages, raise different crops and animals, and yet they are all subjected to the same government policies, extension messages and marketing regimes. Obviously, their needs are diverse and call for open-minded and flexible support systems that, unfortunately, do not exist at present.

However, there are encouraging developments that need to be acknowledged – within the Government, in research institutions and in civil society. These give hope that there is scope for effective people- and ecology-oriented approaches to agricultural development. There is also a huge potential for scaling up innovative approaches. Participatory and people-centred approaches have been well established in India over the past 10–15 years. PRA has been institutionalised as a participatory planning tool. People’s organisations (mostly initiated by NGOs), notably women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs), have mushroomed. SHGs and other village-level institutions have started organising themselves into large federations.

Within this context, the challenge for AME and its partners has been to get PTD rooted and institutionalised. The institutional environment and the available human resource potential, especially in the form of village-level institutions, are conducive. On the other hand, the overall ecological context is all but rosy. The economic context is one of globalisation taking shape, with prices for agricultural products going down, farmers getting more and more indebted and reports of farmers suicides ‘not being able to bear the debt burden’ in the newspapers every day. Within this larger geopolitical scenario, the niche spaces for the rural poor are ever decreasing.

Are the emerging opportunities for alternative and people-centred approaches giving enough space for an alternative growth path, a viable alternative to a globalisation that is totally dictated by market forces? And are we, the ‘change agents’, ready to face the challenges, to use the space that is emerging?

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AME: An Independent Support and Linkage Organisation

This paper is written from the perspective of AME, an organisation that was one of the prime movers in South India promoting sustainable and ecologically sound agriculture. It started in 1986 as a training programme and gradually broadened its approach, becoming a full-fledged resource organisation that plays an increasingly important role in initiating and advancing PTD and in forging collaboration between stakeholders in sustainable agriculture.

AME has the long-term objective of promoting sustainable land use through concerted stakeholder action. AME’s practical aims are to assist NGOs in strengthening their capacities to implement sustainable agriculture programmes and to facilitate collaborative action between NGOs, research institutions and the Government of India’s Departments of Agriculture (DoA). AME’s approach leans on a mix of participatory methodologies such as PTD, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Farmer Field Schools (FFS) in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and Rapid Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Systems (RAAKS).[2]

AME neither implements PTD processes on its own, nor is it in the position to instruct others to do PTD. We are in between. AME does not form part of any other larger institution but occupies its own unique niche. We work ‘downwards’ by giving guidance and field-level facilitation to farmers and NGO field staff. We work ‘upwards’ by feeding the lessons learnt in PTD processes into the formal information systems of research institutions and the Ministry of Agriculture. We work ‘sidewards’ by facilitating exchange between farmers, NGOs, researchers and DoAs in the three regions where we operate. We work ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ by involving banking institutions, input suppliers, and processing and storage experts in the strategic deliberations in the context of the PTD processes.

Figure 2: AME as a linkage agent

Since 1996, AME has been given the explicit mandate by its donor, the Netherlands Government, to be a catalysing agency, with the aim to enhance the linkages between the biomass actors on the Deccan Plateau of South India. It was made a bilateral project in 1997 and has since been formally implemented under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, which endorsed the mandate given to AME. In practice, it has been operating in a way very different from most bilateral projects, in the sense that it has acquired many characteristics of an independent NGO.

After having been given the mandate to be a linkage institution, a key question for AME has been: how do we give practical meaning to it? We may be formally mandated, but do our partner institutions and other stakeholders acknowledge this role? In this paper, we discuss what went into the process of ‘grounding’ AME as a linkage institution in the Indian institutional landscape and how this grounding has been essential for the very institutionalisation of our approach. The outcome of five years of intensive collaboration has been that AME has been entrusted by stakeholders in sustainable agriculture with the mandate of a linkage institution.

A natural development, in institutional terms, has been that AME is now shedding off its project status and becoming formally an Indian organisation. We see this as an essential step in the process of institutionalising PTD.

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Main Actors and their Motivation for PTD

NGOs

Research Institutions

International Research Centres

National and Regional Research Institutions

Passionate Researchers

Government Departments

Banks

Input Suppliers

Local Actors: Small-Scale and Marginal Farmers and their Institutions

In this section, we explore the institutional landscape within which PTD as an approach has taken shape, looking at NGOs, research institutions and DoAs. Other categories of actors, such as the banks and input suppliers are – for reasons of space – discussed only briefly here, but we wish to acknowledge their actual and potential role. We end this section with a most crucial and challenging part of the institutional landscape: the village-level institutions. We also discuss some agro-ecological and socio-economic characteristics of the farming ‘community’, which will explain that it is indeed impossible to talk about a single community. This has important implications for our approach to PTD.

NGOs

South India has a high density of NGOs. The number of registered NGOs in the Deccan Plateau region is estimated at 10,000. During the past ten years, many NGOs that were earlier involved in social action and/or community development have taken up the challenge of land-based programmes. They saw this as a logical next step in supporting the rural poor in their struggle for survival and sustenance. Some of them saw also opportunities here because the Government made large sums available for NGOs to take up watershed programmes. So far, in most cases, the focus has been on people’s mobilisation and organisation for participatory watershed management and on the formation of SHGs (most of them women’s groups), which are primarily concerned with savings and credit management. A smaller number of NGOs became interested in taking these processes a step further and started using the existing social infrastructure in the communities, water-users associations and women’s SHGs, as a basis for agriculture-related initiatives.

It was here that AME as a support organisation came in. NGOs had realised the need to assist farmers in addressing their problems in agriculture, but were looking for professional support, as the majority of them lacked agricultural expertise. Most were familiar with PRA as a tool, but that in itself was not a sufficient methodological basis to develop a participatory approach to developing dryland agriculture.

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Research Institutions

Policymakers and the prevailing system of research and development of agricultural technologies have, so far, paid far less attention to dryland agriculture than to irrigated agriculture in high-potential areas. Moreover, approaches followed often do not address the problems in an adequate manner.

R and D approaches, methods and designs have largely copied the experience of research strategies in well-watered or irrigated areas. This is reflected through focus on limited crops and their selected attributes (e.g. grain yield) rather than emphasising integrated mixed farming systems. Consequently, Rain-fed Farming Research could neither properly identify and fully harness the niche of these areas, nor could it understand and incorporate the rationale of traditional farming systems in these generally fragile, diverse, high-risk, low-productivity environments (Jodha 1996).

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International Research Centres

Research institutions are gradually becoming more open to participatory approaches to technology development in dryland agriculture. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), one of the centres of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), has made a shift since the early 1990s. It evolved collaboration with NGOs, began to accept PRA as a valid participatory research methodology and included participatory elements in its breeding programmes. A push factor has been the fact that, in recent years, research funding has declined. Innovative researchers entered into cost-effective collaborative arrangements with NGOs, to which they outsourced part of their research work. A concrete example is the case of ICRISAT’s collaboration with Myrada (a large NGO in South India) and AME in the development of a leaf-wetness counter, a tool for forecasting outbreak of a fungal disease that affects groundnut.[3]

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National and Regional Research Institutions

The national and regional research institutions picked up this trend somewhat later. Though exposure to the new approaches evolved by trend-setting institutions like ICRISAT, they realised that participatory research has a larger significance.

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Passionate Researchers

In the process of sensitising the institutions, the role of individual enlightened researchers cannot be underestimated. During the past years, AME has built up very encouraging experience with individual researchers who became involved, during their weekends, in PTD processes with AME, NGOs and farmer groups. We have seen these researchers going through radical shifts in their thinking about agriculture. They started publishing their experiences in the LEISA Newsletter of the Netherlands-based Centre for Information on Low-External Input and Sustainable Agriculture (ILEIA), but also in local daily newspapers and scientific journals. What started for them as a hobby became a passion. In some cases, this lead to formal recognition of their PTD work by their institution. But there was also the case of the researcher who shared the learning from a PTD process with the local press and received a letter from his Head of Department who threatened him with disciplinary action if he would continue to deviate from his formal research mandate.

The latest development in this process of building researchers’ awareness and empowering them is the formation of an ‘AME consultants group’. Individual consultants realised the need for a professional informal forum for sharing their experiences. This group is yet in its formative stage; it consists of all twenty-odd consultants working with AME. Most but not all of them are researchers. There is also an ex-pesticides dealer, a farmer, a head of a women’s NGO, two retired government officials and a commercial tax officer! They have agreed to meet on a monthly basis to discuss technical, social and strategic issues in relation to their passion – promoting sustainable agriculture.

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Government Departments

During recent years, two of the Government of India (GoI) Ministries – Agriculture and Rural Development – have started giving more importance to dryland areas. Whereas the focus in earlier years was on technical land-restoration interventions, often through food-for-work programmes, the approach has become more comprehensive and people-oriented. The magnitude of environmental degradation is becoming clear, and it is also realised that dryland regions do have an inherent productive potential. Most remarkable is the increased attention by the GoI to watershed management. Innovative policy guidelines were prepared which spelled out an active role for NGOs and other potential actors. PRA became a widely accepted tool for initiating participatory watershed management programmes.

Box 1: The Government’s Perspective Plan on Watershed Management

In its 4^th Five-Year Plan, the GoI presented a 25-year Perspective Plan on Watershed Management. The total area to be covered is 65 million hectares and the overall investment will be equivalent to about 19 billion Euros. A common approach has been designed, key features of which are participatory approach, implementation through village-level institutions and an envisaged high extent of linkages with panchayats (local councils), credit institutions, research institutions, NGOs and the private sector. GoI recognises that extensive training and capacity building of various stakeholders would be needed but that, as of now, the capacity to guide such processes is inadequate. According to Rita Sharma, Joint Director of Agriculture (and Chair of AME’s Steering Committee): “Capacity building of all actors in the drama must move simultaneously if the watershed development is to be effectively conducted. Indeed, watershed development in rain-fed areas must become a true people’s movement for sustainable food production and livelihood support to rural community” (pers. comm. 2001).

Within this context, enormous opportunities are emerging for organisations like AME to promote sustainable dryland farming through a participatory approach. Development of suitable technologies which redress the degraded ecosystem and which are economically feasible for small-scale and marginal dryland farmers will, in most situations, be a gradual process of small steps, as the margins are narrow. Not only the technologies must be developed but also the necessary forward and backward linkages, such as supply systems for eco-friendly inputs, credit facilities for these, market niches and adequate forms of social organisation to enable farmers to use the technologies effectively. PTD can play a catalytic role. Being participatory, location-specific and oriented to systems rather than crops, it is an approach that addresses the gap left by formal research. Moreover, it is concerned not only with developing technologies but also with strengthening the capacities of people – men and women farmers – to analyse ongoing processes and develop useful innovations.

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Banks

Over the past ten years, the rural banking system has opened up to collective initiatives of small-scale and marginal farmers, mainly through their positive experience with women’s SHGs, which have proven to be very creditworthy. Individual bank managers, who noticed that the LEISA package of practices developed through PTD processes by farmer groups was economically viable, started adjusting their lending policies. These had earlier been completely based on standard packages with high dependence on chemical inputs and aimed at maximising yield rather than net profit.

These are, however, individual cases rather than being an institutionalised response, which is yet to come but it could be facilitated in several ways. AME has been using the following strategies of sensitising the rural banks: all our District Working Committees have a representative of NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development); we invite bank representatives to field days where farmers show the results of PTD processes; and occasionally AME is invited to give training to bank managers on sustainable agriculture.

Training of bank managers should be taken up pro-actively, if we are serious about bringing about a change in the mind-sets of banking institutions.

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Input Suppliers

Commercial suppliers of eco-friendly inputs such as bio-fertilisers see a natural ally in AME. From its side, AME encourages farmers to try out inputs produced by different suppliers and assess for themselves what works best. In some cases, NGOs have started taking up production of biological inputs themselves, with the aim to make them more accessible to farmers and to see whether this could earn income for their own organisation or for farmer groups. A ‘second-generation’ type of PTD experiments has emerged in which NGO staff members, together with enterprising farmers, have started experimenting with the production of bio-control agents and with alternative small-scale production processes of bio-fertilisers (in thermos flasks). These experiments have been initiated mainly by interested NGO staff and AME consultants but, in due course, they would have to be taken up by enterprising farmers in the rural communities.

Top Main Actors and their Motivation for PTD

Local Actors: Small-Scale and Marginal Farmers and their Institutions

Village-level institutions

The institutionalisation of any development intervention starts with some form of community organisation. However, small-scale and marginal farmers are not a coherent interest group that easily organises itself (unlike, for instance, fishing communities, which have organised themselves as a sector to defend their interests at high political levels). There are, of course, indigenous institutions such as traditional tank-management committees, or the remnants of these, and the decentralised political system with village-level panchayats. Whereas the former institutions are sometimes but not always suitable vehicles for taking up new initiatives to develop agriculture, the latter are often highly politicised.

A ‘new’ form of community organisation has taken shape during the past 15 years, mainly through the initiatives of NGOs. Village-level Self Help Groups were formed, first consisting primarily of men, but gradually the majority of SHGs became all female. The main reasons for this feminisation of SHGs are:

1. the fact that women, compared to men, were more serious about savings and credit, which was often the entry-point activity for these groups; and