NICHE AREA OF EXCELLENCE
A holistic crop growth necessitates multi-dimensional strategy involving crop protection and
production approaches. Increasingly, impetus is being given to new discoveries that employ
environmentally safe and sustainable approaches. While rich biodiversity of country offers countless
unexploited green pest control options; the huge agri-residue (pre-and post-harvest) is a gold mine for
development of water conserving value added polymer materials that can serve both as hydrogels and formulation
carriers.
Due to increasing incidents of pest resurgence and pesticide resistance, the focus is on
development and demonstration of safe alternatives. Natural product chemistry presents
tremendous opportunity in this regard. India has advantage of rich biodiversity but natural flora lay unexploited because of lack of desired quantum of skills and enabling environment. There is a need to conduct phase wise systematic and continuous program on mining of unexplored flora for technology generation.
Among all plant sources, neem (Azadirachta indica) enjoys an undisputed position of an iconic
biopesticide source which is being extensively exploited in the neem coated urea technology too.
The surge in the demand of neem oil leading to high inflation is a cause of real concern. Therefore, there is need to invent next generation know-hows for efficient (i) extraction of bioactives from neem seed kernel and (ii) neem based fertilizer coatings using micro/nanotools.
Plant derived biopolymers and agri-residue present tremendous scope to develop environmentally
safe and technically robust drought management technologies like value added super-absorbent
polymers for enhanced moisture and nutrient availability. There is need to strengthen research on agriwaste driven cost effective resource conserving products.
The bioactives derived from natural sources though active against pests under controlled
environment face the constraint of stability and bio efficacy over sustained time period after
application. Besides, in the name of biopesticide, spurious products containing synthetic pesticides are sold to unaware users. Similarly, all hydrogels cannot qualify as agriculture specific technology. Skill generation in the field of plant source derived materials and formulation
technologies and their quality control is thus imperative.
Because of massive information available in public domain in scattered form (publications:
13.23% and patents 3.55% of total global holdings, huge scope to harness the unexploited
potential of country’s biodiversity, there is a need to develop web enabled National phytochemical knowledge base for crop protection.
