Abstract
Agricultural sustainability is a vital parameter to be ascertained locally and globally if food security is to be achieved and maintained. Agricultural sustainability is the combined product of social, economic and ecological sustainability. It is also a function of temporal and spatial variations, a fact which indicates that area-specific sustainability indices need to be designed. We present here an Agricultural Sustainability Index (ASI) for rural eastern India and use it to calculate the ASI for 150 farms for three decades over a 60-year period, viz., 1950–1960, 1980–1990 and 2000–2010 for a representative Indian village of Gangapur (25°83′N, 85°65′E). The ASI was calculated using 30 variables, 10 each of social, economic and ecological sustainability. An extensive questionnaire-based survey was carried out to collect the relevant data. Our study reveals that over a 60-year period, ASI values do not show a statistically significant change. We conclude that the agricultural practices of the region have maintained sustainability so far although the scope for improvement in several broad areas identified by us is immense. Increased ecological literacy and better implementation of government policies, aiming at health, education and better scientist–farmer interactions, must target improved ASI values in coming decades.
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Acknowledgments
The paper is partially the product of the M.Sc. research of the first author. She would like to extend her gratitude to Microbiology Department, MES AG College, Pune, where she was trained. She would also like to thank Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi, for granting her Junior Research Fellowship. The authors thank an anonymous reviewer for his valuable comments that helped improve this paper.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
See Table 8.
Appendix 2
See Table 9.
Appendix 3
See Table 10.
Appendix 4
See Table 11.
Appendix 5
See Table 12.
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Sharma, D., Shardendu, S. Assessing farm-level agricultural sustainability over a 60-year period in rural eastern India. Environmentalist 31, 325–337 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-011-9341-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-011-9341-x