E survey to analyse perception of agricultural experts regarding priority setting for future research in vegetables in India

Abstract

Demand of vegetables shows increasing trend due to enhanced health consciousness and purchasing power of Indian population. The productivity of vegetables is 17.3 million tonnes per hectare which is not sufficient to meet projected requirement of producing 225 million tonnes vegetables by 2030. Moreover 25–30 % vegetables go waste every year due to pre or post-harvest losses. Although India ranks second in vegetable production after China, this sector is still unorganized in scientific and economic terms. With this background, this perception study was designed to identify critical problematic areas, which seek priorities in future research to strengthen vegetable sector in India. Statements of problem under 6 major vegetable research sectors were formulated. Research priorities were obtained by calculating weighted average (WA) on the perception scores given against the statements of problem by 75 respondents of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), State Agricultural Universities (SAU) and Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) and subsequently ranking of the priorities were assigned. Rank one priorities under 6 major vegetable research sectors identified were developing climate resilient varieties (WA = 4.98), standardizing crop and area specific fertilizer schedule (WA = 3.98), estimating actual seed requirement of important vegetables (WA = 5.63), standardizing pesticide doses (WA = 3.39), well defined post-harvest handling techniques (WA = 6.26) and infrastructure and cold storage facility (WA = 7.65). Interaction among different priority issues had been identified through regression analysis. Although priority setting is an ongoing process, this paper tries to flag some empirically tested issues which should be regarded as priority areas of research to strengthen vegetable sector in India.