The soil sciences in India: Policy lessons for agricultural innovation

Understanding the emergence of a hybrid knowledge production discourse: The case of the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) drought tolerant rice research in India

“…These regulations are not centrally imposed by the apex organisations such as ICAR, CGIAR or GCP, and these are quite diametric to the organisational culture of these apex bodies. For example, ICAR itself is a very rigid, bureaucratic, hierarchical institution with centralised planning (Raina et al, 2006;Hall et al, 2001;Mruthyanjaya and Ranjitha, 1998), whereas the functioning of this partnership is decentralised, non-hierarchical and absence of scientific bureaucracy. Therefore, this partnership is fairly autonomous in its functioning (Basu et al, 2017c).…”

“…Third, hitherto, agricultural research partnershipsthose are able to deliver and sustained for a longer period in Indiahave either had private sector involvement (see Hall et al, 22 FGD with Farmers, Koderma District, Jharkhand, 14 December 2012;FGD with Farmers, Hazaribagh District, Jharkhand, 17 December 2012;FGD with Farmers, Chatra District, Jharkhand, 18 December 2012. 23 2001) or centrally led by the apex public institute (for example, the AICCIPs, NATP and NIAP) (Hall et al, 2001;Raina et al, 2006). In contrast to this, this research partnership was essentially led by itself (scientists) and continues to exist over last two decades and manages to deliver in terms of knowledge production (such as developing drought tolerant varieties and producing research papers).…”

“…4 This research is important for the following three reasons. First, hitherto, agrarian knowledge production is studied taking a single perspective in account such as from the research partnership perspective (Hall et al, 2001), from the perspective of transdisciplinarity (Raina et al, 2006;Raina, 2003) and from the perspective of farmers participation (Witcombe et al, 2005); in contrast to these studies, this research takes-up all these three perspectives simultaneously to provide a holistic and comprehensive analysis of agrarian knowledge production; second, there are few studies that reveal the working of science in transdisciplinary settings in India within a North-South research collaboration; third, given the composite nature of GCP knowledge production (Basu, 2016) with a clear non-instrumental alignment of the Indian agricultural research and extension establishment (Raina et al, 2006;Sulaiman and Hall, 2002) it would be interesting to find out the particular knowledge production discourse emerging out of such interface; and finally, the particular type of knowledge production discourse that emerged within the GCP drought-tolerant rice research may have wider implications for agrarian knowledge-producing institutions generally, such as those linked to the CGIAR, NARS and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).…”

Genes to feed the world: The weakest link?

“…However, a range of other factors are involved. Indian public-sector research has for long been plagued by an institutional separation between pure and applied research and an alienation of science from production (Scoones, 2006;Raina et al, 2006). This tends to deepen the gulf between molecular biologists and plant breeders, as well as increasing the difficulty of introducing new new crop varieties based on the work of either group of scientist.…”

Trend and network analysis to reveal disciplinary position of soil science and its sub-disciplines

“…The publication patterns in each sub-discipline imply an indicator of the impact of the research content to know how soil science research works. The bibliometric method of analysing scientific publications, which gives the quantitative research output in each sub-discipline, demonstrating the research work in each field, but cannot show how much of this research is used by society (RAINA et al, 2006).…”