Zero Budget Natural Farming in India: Aiming Back to the Basics

Crisis of Indian agriculture is very pertinent at this moment as green revolution is gradually losing its hope. Excessive, pointless exploitation of broods of green revolution has left bad footprints on country’s food security and environmental safety. With the motto to ensure food security by reviving Indian agriculture in environmentally safe way as well as to release farmers from debt cycle and suicides, zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) has come in the picture, which discards uses of all the chemical farming inputs and relies on natural way of farming i.e. rejuvenating soil and crop health through its own practices (Jivamrita, Bijamrita, mulching, soil aeration, intercropping, crop diversification, bunds, bio-pesticides etc.). ZBNF movement right now is the most popular agrarian movement which begun in 2002 in Karnataka and later successfully spread in many states (specially, of South India) of the nation through numbers of trainings, demonstrations and various promotional activities. Successful outcomes from farmers’ fields of south Indian states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka etc. are encouraging and grabbing attention of farmers, public and private organisations towards ZBNF in recent times. Yet, various controversies regarding its transparency, inadequate information, efficacy, practices, idealisms, even the term ‘zero budget’ etc. have agglutinated around ZBNF over the years since it debuted. Critics in fact have cited several references of drastic yield reductions with ZBNF practices in many places. Adequate scientific evaluation or monitoring of ZBNF’s successes or failures through multi-locational trials is now therefore the needful before allowing or restraining its run in Indian agriculture.