ABSTRACT
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is an approach developed to manage farmland for sustainable crop production, while simultaneously preserving soil and water resources. The resource conservation technologies (RCTs) primarily focus on resource savings through minimal tillage, ensuring soil nutrients and moisture conservation through crop residues and growth of cover crops, and adoption of spatial and temporal crop sequencing. Some of the RCTs that are being promoted in the rice-wheat belt of the Indo-Gangetic Plains are: zero tillage, laser land levelling, bed planting, surface seeding, rotary tillage, use of leaf colour chart, mechanical rice transplanter, etc. Conservation agriculture as an upcoming paradigm for raising crops will require an innovative system perspective to deal with diverse, flexible and context specific needs of technologies and their management. There is need for policy analysis to understand how CA technologies integrate with other technologies, and how policy instruments and institutional arrangements promote or deter CA.
