India is endowed with four of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots. Yet, the country continues to face a formidable challenge in conserving its biological resources because of climate change, land use and land cover change, and habitat fragmentation. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that biodiversity, directly and indirectly, can strongly influence India’s food and nutritional security and the livelihoods of its people. Understanding the myriad processes and networks through which biodiversity relates to, and can potentially contribute to, India’s food security is imperative if the country has to sustainably manage its biological diversity to meet the food security requirements of the country.
As a part the Mission, this programme will address how the larger goals of biodiversity conservation can reconcile with the current agricultural intensification and food production systems in the country. To this end, the programme will develop methodology, using both primary and secondary data, to quantify the role of biodiversity in ensuring food security and enhancing agricultural productivity.
Further, it will develop preliminary estimates of the contribution of biodiversity to India’s food and nutritional security, enhancement of agricultural productivity, diversification of livelihoods, and increment of rural incomes by sustainable use of biodiversity. Finally, the programme will explore and develop a road map for incorporating biodiversity based models of enhancing agricultural productivity, diversifying livelihoods, and increasing rural incomes by sustainable use of biodiversity.
The methodologies developed would be used in field evaluation of the contributions of biodiversity in agriculture in different agro-ecological zones of the country. With such estimates of contribution in place, strategies and policies can be developed for incorporating biodiversity-based models in agriculture in the country. Over and above all, food and nutritional security would be attained throughout India and other agriculture-dependent nations can adopt this programme as their role model in reaching the same goal.
Various experts from diverse academic and professional backgrounds come together to build the team that looks after this programme
He was ICAR Emeritus Scientist at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore. Currently he is Senior Professor at IIT, Jammu. He is an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the State Environment Award, Government of Karnataka.
He is a Senior Fellow (Associate Professor) at the Suri Sehgal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation. Dr. Ravikanth’s research over the last 20 years has focused on applying molecular tools in the context of tropical forest conservation and species recovery.
He is Senior Fellow and Convenor, SMS Foundation Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment.
He is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).
