Adoption and Dis-adoption of SRI: A Study of the Dynamics
Quantifying the benefits and analysing the factors that encourage farmers to adopt or dis-adopt SRI methods in the four major rice-producing states in India, this study offers policy recommendations for up-scaling in order to attain agricultural sustainability.
R ice is the most important staple food in India. The demand for rice has been growing every year and it is estimated that, to meet the projected demand by 2050, the yield of rice has to increase by more than three percent every year between now and then. However, India’s rice yield has improved by only one percent since early 2000 (Directorate of Economics and Statistics, 2013).
The recent Food Security Bill passed in India, geared to provide cheap food to the poor, will increase the pressure on the country’s capacity to produce more food on its own. Estimates show that the country will require five to six million metric tonnes of additional food grains annually, to meet the demands of the growing population and to fulfill the commitment of the Food Security Bill. It has been proven and accepted that sustained technological change is the primary driver of growth in food production.
Among the recent technological changes in agriculture, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has been recognized as the innovation capable of achieving the target of producing ‘more with less’. SRI is an agro-ecological innovation, appropriate for small and marginal farmers. It has gained popularity and wider acceptance among farmers and other stakeholders due to increased production with fewer inputs, reduced costs, and resilience to the vagaries of the climate. In order to understand the dynamics of the adoption process, carefully designed longitudinal farm surveys were conducted during 2011–12, and 2012–13 among 715 SRI farmers in selected districts in Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The farmers were selected using the stratified random sampling procedure, representing three distinct groups, that is, practising SRI farmers, including the new adopters (the adopters), farmers who discontinued the use of SRI (the dis-adopters) and farmers who had never practised SRI (non-SRI farmers as control).