Shoutout to My Wonderful Host Institute
Having been at ICRISAT Patancheru for over a month now, I’ve decided that it deserves greater explanation and acknowledgment.
When I first arrived on campus, the first thing I noticed was a small, beige-brown lizard splayed over a sign. It looked like it was utterly at home, content with sticking to brick walls for eternity. While I still cannot call ICRISAT “home,” it has become a familiar, welcoming place full of people I respect, admire, and learn from.
But first, a bit of background information: since 1972, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics has been researching and creating solutions for farmers and agricultural science. As a pioneer institution studying rural Indian farmers, ICRISAT has demonstrated the need for balance between natural resource management and intensive research in plant genomes. Its work does not sit around idle, either; as of 2009, all of ICRISAT’s publications and data are available for public use and frame national policies.
Even though I work primarily in Inclusive Market-Oriented Development (IMOD), I have witnessed the importance of inter-departmental cooperation and teamwork. Without the efforts of agricultural pathologists and geneticists, decades of research on chickpea cultivation and genomics would not exist. In fact, my current research also would not exist, as there would be no new chickpea variety to assess the socioeconomic effects of.
However, that is not to say that IMOD is completely dependent on new biotechnology and crop varieties. After all, what good is a product with no market? Sociologists and economists from my department often visit villages to take baseline surveys, aggregate data, and find areas of improvement throughout the agricultural process.
Decades of village surveys and data provide a consistent snapshot of conditions in rural India for generations; they allow researchers to create better models and ask unique questions about, say, the nutritional patterns within traditional households. Incredible institutions like ICRISAT and the World Vegetable Center deserve more respect for the resources and manpower dedicated to global food security and aiding farmers.
