While
the Mission can make its rightful claim to have contributed significantly to
the outstanding achievement in food grains production in the recent past, very little
has been done by way of documenting the efforts that went into implementing
various activities under the planned interventions. Of course a web sIte of the
mission has been developed that has a lot of informative and interactive content
on the physical and financial progress intervention wise, across the states and
the districts as also the APY (Area, Production, Yield) analysis of the NFSM
districts as against the non NFSM districts over the years. However in terms of
assessing the inter se efficacy of
the technical components at the macro level and performance of specific
component in any local area there is no proper documentation done beyond instinctive
feeling of the members of the project management teams based on their feedback
from the field visits.
As
per the guidelines of the mission, States were required to undertake concurrent
evaluation, at least once every year if not at the end of each crop season.
Baseline surveys were required to be completed for all the Districts included
in the Mission. National Productivity Council also helped in standardizing the
monitoring and evaluation formats for facilitating good comparative assessment
across the Districts and the states. Unfortunately, barring a couple of states
there has not been much progress made on this aspect. Of course first priority in
the field is to ensure action through timely delivery of technology and
knowledge to the farmers, it is felt that more could have been done in
responding to the felt needs of the farmers in any area through more customized
interventions had there been a structured feedback mechanism in place through
proper documentation of the implementation. It may be alright to say that the
results speak for themselves and we need not worry too much on trying to find
out in descending order the importance of technical interventions while
promoting a slew of programs. However
for sustaining the efforts it is essential to know what is working well and
what is not.
At
the Government of India level, we have been giving account of the mission
activities every six months to the General Council headed by hon’ble
Union Agriculture Minister. Implementation of the Mission programs is regularly
being reviewed in the Executive Committee at the level of Secretary Agriculture
and Cooperation in its meetings held at least half yearly. Progress reviews and
analysis presented in these meetings by the States are kept in public domain on
the web site of the mission so as to keep its all the stakeholders constantly updated
of the developments under the Mission. Mid term evaluation of
the Mission in a structured manner is currently underway at the National level.
An in-house publication ‘NFSM –
Retrospect and Prospects’ has been compiled
with facts and figures after four years of its implementation to inform the policy
makers on its possible future direction in the 12th Plan.
In
order to boost the documentation work, it has now been decided to take up
studies on specific topics through the Crop development Directors of the
Department of Agriculture and Cooperation supported by the Project Management
Teams at the National, State and the District Levels. A list of these topics
covering all the three crops and all the States included in the scheme along
with the methodology being adopted has been placed on the web site. It is
expected that these 17 studies would be completed by May end this year. Another
initiative in this direction relates to compiling the results of the
implementation of Accelerated Pulses Production Program (A3P) in 2010-11. It is
expected that the compilation would be ready for publication by March end. Six Agro
Economic Research Centres (AERCs) have been tasked to assess the performance of
‘Bringing Green Revolution to Eastern India’
the implementation coordination of which was the responsibility of NFSM team.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is being roped in to study the pilot
projects taken up by ICRISAT and ICARDA under NFSM Pulses.
It
is hoped that these studies would help in identifying the critical factors that
contributed to the success or failure of the projects or the programs under the
Mission which would help in designing better interventions in the 12th
plan. Besides, the studies would energize and enhance the internal capacity of
the Department for better monitoring of the programs. The atmosphere in the
Mission is study oriented at present, which is a very good omen considering
that the new knowledge would better address the challenges which would only
progressively increase once the low hanging fruits are plucked in terms of
bridging the large yield gaps in the potential districts.