What India Carried From Israel- The Agrarian Perspective
As the earlier BW Businessworld report had suggested, Prime Minister of India and Prime Minister of Israel had signed three multifaceted pact for agriculture cooperation and water conservation. It can be termed as a tactical partnership between both the nations for agrarian expertise and as reported, the water conservation. This is Indian premier’s most awaited take away from a nation which is almost covered by arid zone (desert land).
Earlier to this, an in-charge from one of these excellence centres run with Israeli cooperation was very hopeful that PM of India will come back with something more precious than a strategic or tactical weapon system from Israel. Israel’s expertise in water conservation and agriculture is most admired in world, keeping in mind that they are one of the top fresh agriculture produce exporter’s with minimum of naturally available resources.
As reported by us on the first day of Indian PM’s visit to Israel, MASHAV (Israeli foreign ministries capacity building arm for foreign nations) and centre of excellence run by MASHAV in India will also be more strengthened.This time Israel’s agriculture ministry will also induce a commercially sustainable business model that will involve farmers produce organisations (FPO).It will also cover provision of quality planting material (as they do in other centre of excellence), and most important the transfer of post-harvest technical know-how along with tactics to market linkages with special emphasis on inclusion of private players (a much needed practice to ease huge pressure of transportation from farmers).
Unlike India, where dependency on rainfall is still having strong roots. Israel has developed a state of the art irrigation system that can teach us multiple lessons. During Indian PM’s Israel visit an expert from Israel told media that “When we built our nation we did not have God’s gift on surface (a good soilfor agriculture, or water bodies on surface) or beneath it (no oil or petrochemical resource)”. “Israel has capitalised over one resource, which comes in between these two ears (the brain)” he added.
Two nations had developed program for next three years named India Israel Development Cooperation in Agricultural that will be functioning from 2018 to 2020. A joint working group will look after progress in each of the programs. For Agrarian and water conservation, two of the nations have termed it a “Strategic Partnership in Water and Agriculture”, main focus area of this pact will be water conservation, waste management, water efficacy reforms, reutilisation of treated waste water in agriculture. This pact will also focus on NDA government’s dream program for treatment of Ganga River along with other major river bodies in India. It is also a good news that PM has focused on water resource technology pact during his visit of Netherland prior to his Israel visit, and expertise of both the nations (Netherland and Israel) may prove to be very fruitful for India.
