Standardization of sustainability indicators for hill vegetable farming

Sustainability is an important concept which tries to find a good balance between the need for food production and the preservation of the ecological system within the environment. Sustainability is all about to meet overall production, social and ecological requirements in consonance with changing demographics and diet structure. Very limited tools are available to assess agriculture sustainability at farm level and the tools which has been developed does not satisfy regional needs. Though sustainability is a global concept but region specific indicators required to be developed to assess it as the indicators developed for agriculture in plains are not necessarily suitable for hill agriculture. Sustainability indicators inform about the state of the functioning of a system and help to define goals, link them to objectives and assess progress towards meeting them; selection of appropriate indicators is very important step in sustainability studies. In the present study, an attempt has been made to standardize indicators for sustainability of vegetable farming in Himachal Pradesh. In total, eleven indicators were finalized under three dimensions of sustainability viz economic, social and environmental after deliberation with experts in the area. To assess their relative importance, the selected indicators were send to the panel of experts and on the basis of gathered opinion indicators were analyzed to find out appropriateness in sustainability studies. Among 11 finalized indicators, production efficiency and soil health were having maximum relative weightage (1.00) followed by net profit, market accessibility and farmers’ knowledge on improved practices with relative weightage above 0.95. Comparatively to other indicators preparedness to drought, community relations have minimum weightage which is < 0.90. In total, all selected indicators were found suitable for sustainability studies in hill vegetable farming with varying degree of weightage. The selected indicators can be employed for calculating overall sustainability index for vegetable farming in hills. Economic dimension carries maximum importance followed by social and environmental dimensions of sustainability.