Climate Change Resilient Crops to Sustain Indian Agriculture

The agriculture sector in India is susceptible to the frequent and erratic climatic irregularities. Anticipated changes in the climate due to intensive anthropogenic activities may cause worst conditions. Models of crop production, considered together with global climate models, indicated that global warming would increase the exposure of major crops to temperature stress, leading ultimately to lower crop yields. Such decrease in yields varied significantly across different states of the country, and there remained significant uncertainties about their magnitude. Various studies also indicated that climatic variability alone had the potential to decrease yields to an extent comparable with or greater than the decrease in yields expected due to rising mean temperatures. The climatic changes led to increase in temperature and water stress, which caused heavy losses in yield of any crop. It may be a big challenge for the agriculture scientists and country leaders to feed the coming future Indian population sufficiently. Development of new climate resilient crop varieties, generation of renewable energy resources and use of green technologies might be helpful for mitigating the impact of climate change and sustained agriculture productivity in near future. To cope with intense changes as projected in climate, new research paradigm of bringing all stake holders is urgently required to establish suitable long-term strategies for addressing the Indian agriculture sustainability.