Promoting Climate Smart Agriculture through Policies and Schemes in India: Temporal and Strategic Overview

The challenges of climate change are now being experienced by all the countries in the world through higher average temperatures, variability in precipitation, rise in sea level and more frequent climatic extremes. Climate change is emerging as a major threat to the livelihood and food security of millions of people across the world. It directly affects the natural resources sectors and especially in developing countries the economies of the people depend on them. Thus it indirectly affects economic growth, income distribution, household welfare, food and nutritional security. In this dilemma, the concept of climate smart livelihoods or climate smart agriculture emerged as one of the doable solutions which seem to have potential to cope up with climate change impacts. Throughout the world and more particularly in countries most dependent on agriculture, the policies are framed and implemented to support large population on one hand and sustaining economy and food security on the other. India is one of countries where agriculture and allied sectors are the primary source of livelihood for more than 60% of the country’s population. Therefore, the Government of India (GoI) has introduced several policies, programmes and schemes to improve and strengthen Indian agriculture. Policies introduced in recent years focus on climate smart agriculture (CSA) practices. This article attempts to look into existing policies and programmes in agriculture and allied sectors to understand the perspectives in detail and analyse the outcomes aligning with the production, resilience and mitigation under the broad framework of CSA.