News New research collaborations between MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar (IIT Ropar) aim to support agricultural practices in India and improve food security

Andi Sutton, Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab January 9, 2020

We are pleased to announce the 2020 winners of grants made possible by the MIT-IIT Ropar Seed Fund, a new faculty research fund that aims to initiate new water- and food systems-related research collaborations between faculty and research scientists from MIT and IIT Ropar. This grant program, launched in 2019, was developed between the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar (IIT Ropar), and is administrated in partnership with MIT-India, which is a part of MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). This seed fund, which awards researchers up to $15,000 to support research engagement between MIT and IIT Ropar in order to develop water and food systems solutions to challenges in these sectors in India. 2020 grant award winners include:

A Checklist-based Advisory to Minimize the Cost and Duration of Worse-before-better in Transitioning from Chemical to Organic Smallholder Farming
MIT PI: Chintan Vaishnav, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
IIT Ropar Collaborator: Parwinder Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Agriculture, and the soil input and field management choices made by farmers, has a significant impact on environmental sustainability. In India, 98% of farmers currently follow conventional practices using chemical fertilizers. They remain hesitant to adopt organic farming practices despite its promise of greater sustainability and profitability. One common assumption is that their reluctance stems from the debilitating consequences of a “worse-before-better” scenario, where agricultural yields—and therefore income—decline temporarily during the transition from conventional to organic farming, even though organic farmers refute this notion.

Chintan Vaishnav, a senior lecturer in the Sloan School of Management, is collaborating with Parwinder Singh, psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Ropar, to develop a solution to this challenge. They will use ethnography-based system dynamics modeling to determine the conditions that would be most supportive to the transition from conventional to organic farming, as well as those that would be most favorable to the farmer. They will use these data to develop a decision-support tool to assist farmers in effectively making this transition. The research and modeling will focus on the regions of Punjab and Haryana in India where the problem of chemical overuse in agriculture is most acute. At the close of the project, the team will have a checklist-based advisory that smallholder farmers in India can use to guide their risk perception and actions during thir transition from conventional to organic farming.

Mapping Agriculture and Yields Forecasting Over India Using High-Resolution Microwave Remote Sensing
MIT PI: Dara Entekhabi, Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
IIT Ropar Collaborator: Reet Kamal Tiwari, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering

The question of how much land is under cultivation and what the likely food crop yields are in areas that are cultivated are fundamental, yet at present there is a lack of near-real-time information on both. This is a problem especially in India where small-scale subsistence agriculture is the dominant source of food. Without accurate data on cultivated land and crop yield, food security is jeopardized; food reserves are already low to non-existent and, when crops are mostly rain-fed, the systems are vulnerable to drought, heat stress, and crop loss.

Dara Entekhabi, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, is collaborating with IIT Ropar’s Reet Kamal Tiwari, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering to develop a remote sensing device that can draw information on vegetation and soil using active and passive microwave systems. Professor Tiwari brings expertise in remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems, where he has used optical, thermal, and microwave imagery for land applications including soils, vegetation, and the cryosphere. Professor Entekhabi, the MIT PI who will be leading this effort, is also the science team lead of the NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission which launched in 2015. Together, they aim to develop the capability to regularly map the vegetation health, growth stage, soil moisture, and growing degree days of land under agricultural production in India, all using Earth-orbiting satellite measurements. The team intends to use these data to monitor food crop yields and perform crop forecasting in advance of harvests to help improve the productivity of smallholder farms, the efficiency of existing agriculture practices, and overall food security in the region.