Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2019)

Climatic conditions in India are knowns to cause about 20% variability in productivity due to intra-and inter-seasonal fluctuations. Management of drought by employing various practices may help minimizing these variations in crops’ productivity to a greater extent. Apart from many reasons, the poor resource baseness of farmers deter them to adopt improved technology particularly land and water conservation related activities. Rrainfall aberrations and frequent occurrence of drought spells of different degrees are the main reasons for low productivity. Drought management strategy consists of the two main approaches; (i) drought evading practices, and drought alleviating practices. This paper presents in very brief an overview of such practices which tend to alleviate the drought effects. Some examples from success stories have been given which are based on experiments done on research stations and also on-farm research experiences with specials reference to black clay soils of Madhya Pradesh.

Further, a lot of modern technologies and practices have been tried during recent past to conserve rain water and soil for enhancing the productivity on sustainable basis, traditional wisdom on ‘Indigenous Rural Technologies’ must also be linked and tried in a big way with suitable modifications, if any. This will not only help in maximizing agricultural production per unit of area but also trigger the people’s participation in the process and therefore mitigating drought effects.