Pulses for Sustainable Livelihood and Food Security

Pulses has important role in contributing to food and nutritional security and replenishing soil nutrients having a huge potential in addressing needs like future global food security, nutrition and environmental sustainability needs. They also play an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture production by lowering GHG emissions. Farmers in grain and oilseed production have found economic benefits from lower input costs and increased profits by including a pulse crop in their rotation. In the face of shrinking natural resources and high population growths, enhancing production of pulses is now a major concern for Bihar in particular and nation as whole . The current shortfall in pulse availability is mainly due to less seed replacement rate of improved varieties, poor adoption of improved technologies by the farmers, abrupt climatic changes, complex disease pest syndrome, and emergence of new bio-types and races of key pests and pathogens and declining total factor productivity. The possibility of improving pulse productivity two to three times through existing varieties and available package of technologies has been demonstrated in FLDs by adoption of entirely new but simple and farmer-friendly technologies and tools. Considering that the frontiers of expansion of cultivated area are negligent, high demand of pulses must come from increase in yield by strengthening adaptive research and technology assessment, refinement and transfer capabilities, so that the existing technology transfer gaps can be bridged. For this, an appropriate network of extension service needs to be created to stimulate and encourage both top-down and bottom-up flows of information between farmers, extension workers, and research scientists to promote generation, adoption, and evaluation of location-specific farm technologies.