Development and Deployment of Rust Resistant Wheat Varieties in India – Insights from Technology Transfer and Policy Response from the National Seed Production Program

Abstract

Wheat, a major Indian staple food crop is largely prone to rusts infection. Inter alia, wheat producers have been advocated to adopt the recently released innovative technologies (rust resistant high yielding wheat varieties) developed under the All India Coordinated Research Project to counter the significant yield losses. In the milieu, we investigated the technological trend in terms of seed indent followed by policy options for transfer of technology at farmers’ field. Research findings indicated that the wheat producers adopted old technologies (varieties in our case). In the recent past five years, the trend hasn’t witnessed any drastic change despite several rust resistant varieties have been tested and released for various agro-climatic conditions. Recent varieties take about 5 years to reach their peak adoption since release and is attributed to the innovative transfer of technologies. At the producers’ level, technologies have been upscaled though frontline demonstrations, especially on cluster mode. Demonstrations resulted in an average yield gain of 699 kg/ha for an innovative rust resistant technology (HD 2967) in comparison to its check. Despite the increasing demand and promotion of latest technologies, the need and availability of ‘producer choice variety’ is still persisting which has to be addressed. Innovations like ‘community seed banks’, enabling public-private partnership, contract farming (quadpartite model), participatory demonstrations and blockchain enabled ‘seed tracker’ will strengthen the transfer of technology system in Indian wheat production.