Agriculture feeds the world — and is also destroying it. India’s indigenous knowledge systems already hold the solutions modern environmental science is desperately seeking. Dr. Rupam Borgohain opens with a stark global picture: paddy agriculture and livestock farming contribute 15% of total greenhouse gas emissions; the Amazon rainforest is losing 6,000 hectares daily to soybean monocultures cleared by satellite-guided road-cutting. Meanwhile, humanity cultivates fewer than 200 plant species despite 70,000 edible options existing in nature.
India’s traditional approach to agricultural resource management offers a direct counter: polyculture rather than monoculture, soil biodiversity conservation, wetland and water body stewardship, and community-based natural resource governance. Dr. Borgohain argues that these aren’t heritage curiosities but urgently practical frameworks — if formalised, documented, and integrated into national and international sustainable development agendas.
The roadmap he outlines is systemic: establish knowledge-exchange platforms linking traditional practitioners with researchers and policy makers; fund systematic documentation of Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK); integrate validated practices into state agricultural recommendations; and advocate their inclusion in UN sustainable development frameworks. The bottleneck is not knowledge — it’s the institutional will to treat non-certified practitioners as experts and build the links that connect ground wisdom to policy action.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Rupam Borgohain is the Principal Scientist at Assam Agricultural University. He has contributed to number of research papers particularly in plant breeding and genetics.