Rajasthan Agricultural Competitiveness Project

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The development objective of the Rajasthan Agricultural Competitiveness Project for India is to establish the feasibility of sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and farmer incomes through a distinct agricultural development approach by integrating agriculture water management and agricultural technology, farmer organizations and market innovations in selected locations across the ten agro ecological zones of Rajasthan. There are four components to the project. The first component is climate resilient agriculture. This component will support climate-resilient approaches that allows for the sustainable use of the natural resource base through agricultural and livestock production systems aiming to increase long term productivity and farm incomes in an environment marked by increased climate and, in particular, rainfall variability. Agrarian households in rural Rajasthan face tremendous challenges even with the existing levels of climate variability, let alone those that may come with future changes in climate. This is often referred to as an adaptation deficit. Thus the package of options in this component is based on a strategy that is robust under any future climate scenario and focuses on ways of overcoming this existing adaptation deficit as a necessary step towards longer term climate resilience. The second component is markets and value chains. The objective of this component is to enable farmers to engage in profitable market oriented production, that is sustainable, and to promote partnerships and market linkages with other value chain participants and agribusinesses. The component will help producer groups, agro enterprises, and commodity associations, to actively engage in the development of commodity value chains by partially financing demand-driven investment proposals to producer organization through a matching grant. The third component is farmer's organizations and capacity building. This component will support (a) mobilization and establishment of farmer groups and organizations, (b) capacity building for participatory planning and plan implementation of collective actions; and (c) strengthening of institutions and human resources associated with the project implementation. The fourth component is project management, Monitoring and Evaluation (M and E), learning. This component will undertake project management, provide for robust monitoring and M and E systems with a view of potentially scaling up approaches deemed successful under this operation across the state; as well as aim to build synergies and convergence with ongoing schemes from the Government of Rajasthan (GoR) and the Government of India (GoI) such as Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), etc. Development and pilot testing of production risk management tools in crop and livestock sectors will be supported under this component, in partnership with insurance companies and banks.