Climate change has severely hampered India's food security as can be seen by extreme weather events that have taken place within the year 2022. Adverse affects due to climate change will only worsen further.
India is expected to experience heatwaves beyond the limit of human survivability according to a World Bank report, this will be an added threat towards India's food security.
The government has claimed that the preventive measures taken against food insecurity due to climate change are satisfactory to tackle the ongoing food grain crises.
Crop Production Has Increased by 30 Million Tonnes in 4 Years
To meet the challenges of sustaining domestic food production in the face of changing climate the Indian government intends to counter the food security crisis by increasing food grain production.
To deal with the impact of climate change in food grain production, the Government is implementing National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA).
"NMSA is one of the Missions within the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) which aims to evolve and implement strategies to make Indian agriculture more resilient to the changing climate and to sustain increase in production."
The government has developed agricultural contingency plans for 650 districts so far. In the last decade the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has released 1752 varieties of climate change tolerant crops to increase food grain production.
These climate resilient technologies have also been demonstrated on farmer's fields in over 446 villages.
ICAR is also in collaboration with the Indian meteorological department (IMD) to issue agrometeorology advisories every week.
The Indian government has launched a flagship project specifically for research and development in the field of climate resilient agriculture National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA).
A number of other plans have been announced under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) to aid agricultural production.
This includes the initiative to provide farmers Soil health Cards which allows for the implementation of various activities to improve soil fertility under the Soil Health Management Scheme .
Due to these interventions, crop production has been in a steady incline for the last five years.
In 2021, crop production was a total of 315.72 million tonnes as compared to the output in 2017 which capped at 285.01million tonnes.
The government also said that "district level risk and vulnerability assessment of Indian agriculture to climate change has been prepared which is useful for several Ministries/ Departments for prioritizing resources towards developmental programs."
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