Indian agriculture is at cross-roads. The Green Revolution becoming a Greed Revolution resulted in ecological crisis and lead to a technology fatigue. The Prime Minister called for alternatives to enhance production through smallholders and in rainfed areas.

The natural resources that support production systems are continuously degrading. This is more so in the rainfed eco-system. Unless this malady is corrected, even the improved genetic material will fail to show up its potential. 

The focus has to be on soil health and diminishing resources like water. Now it is widely recognized that rainfed areas are not only thirsty but hungry too. There is the need for improving the soil productivity through turnover of organics and providing deficit irrigation at physiological stages of crops become the key to improve production in rainfed areas.

Rainfed production systems are highly site specific and there can never be universal recommendations as a  penancea to address these systems. While efforts have to continue to evolve suitable genetic material, the first stance in enhancing the productivity is to improve soil and crop husbandry using internalized doable technologies and that too through community based systems. Such an approach results in reduced costs in production. Our country has more marginal and small farmers, mostly practicing rainfed farming.

In this book, these issues have been highlighted with possible solutions. However it is realized that the smallholders not only need internalizable systems of production bur also non-farm activities as a source of additional income for their sustenance.