National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA): Assessing Climate-Resilient Farming and Sustainable Agricultural Practices in India (2014–2026)

Policy Update
Ayan Bordoloi

Background

Over the past decade and more, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) has evolved from a standalone climate-adaptation-focused mission into part of India’s agricultural policy framework. NMSA was launched as one of the eight missions of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) with the objective of making Indian agriculture more productive, remunerative and resilient to climate variability, especially in the face of the huge rainfed agriculture base in India.

The article describes the institutional journey of NMSA from 2014–2026 and evaluates their key initiatives: Rainfed Area Development, Per Drop More Crop, Soil Health Management and the National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture programme; along with measured outcomes of the mission, and the structural constraints that remain, most prominently, lack of funding at the last mile and underfunding.

The agriculture sector in India is in an ambivalent situation in relation to climate change. At the same time it is one of the sectors most vulnerable to the physical challenges posed by a warming climate and a significant national source of GHGs as a result of land use, livestock and input-intensive operations. Nearly 60 per cent of the country’s net sown area is rainfed and the rainfed base in India contributes close to 40 per cent of the country’s total food production, making it extremely susceptible to fluctuations in monsoons, prolonged dry spells, and extreme weather events.

Against this background, the Government of India, under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) announced in 2008, formed the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture out of eight national missions including mission on solar energy, energy efficiency, water, green India, strategic knowledge for climate change, sustainable habitats, mission on Himalayan ecosystem and mission on food crops. NMSA was established in 2014-15 with a task to design and execute approaches that can improve the productivity, sustainability, income and climate resilience of agriculture, and encourage location-specific integrated farming systems, soil and moisture conservation, integrated soil health management, and efficient water use.

The institutional path of the mission has not been uniform. NMSA was integrated into a greater mission titled Green Revolution-Krishonnati Yojana from 2018-19 and was further incorporated into the framework of Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (PM-RKVY) from 2022-23 with a focus on resource conservation, resilience to climate change and value addition. This recurring administrative shuffling is indicative of the trend of other Indian agricultural policies, which has been the tendency to merge standalone missions into umbrella schemes, which would in turn have implications on the monitoring, funding and evaluation of other missions over time.

Functioning

NMSA was not intended to be a new delivery vehicle, but was rather conceived as a convergence mechanism; one in which a variety of ongoing and new interventions related to sustainable agriculture would be brought together.

It is based on four main pillars, namely Rainfed Area Development (RAD) Integrated Farming Systems for diversified and risk resilient livelihoods, Soil Health Management (SHM)  which has Soil Health Card scheme as its backbone, Per Drop More Crop (PDMC) which, since 2015-16, has been integrated into the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) under the Ministry of Agriculture, and Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture: Mionitoring, Modelling and Networking (CCSAMMN) – the research and knowledge arm of the mission, closely associated with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s (ICAR) National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) programme.

The table below summarises the mission’s key components as they stand in 2026, following successive rounds of institutional restructuring.

Table 1: NMSA’s principal components and their institutional placement as of 2026. Compiled from Government of India press releases and departmental guidelines.

Performance

Rainfed Area Development

RAD is the part that is most closely connected to NMSA’s initial climate-resilience mandate. It promotes farmers’ transition from high-stakes monoculture to Integrated Farming Systems integrating crop production with plant cultivation, livestock rearing, agro-forestry and/or, if possible, aquaculture to avoid complete income loss in case of climate shock. FY 2025-26, an allocation of ₹343.86 crore was made for implementation of RAD in States and Union Territories, wherein 96,013 is the number of farmers trained in integrated and diversified farming practices. The structure of the programme is based on models of farming systems developed by ICAR and is designed to be adapted to the agro-climatic conditions of the local area and not necessarily applied in a uniform manner.

Per drop more crop and water-use efficiency

Water stress is one of the most pressing climate change threats to Indian farmers and PDMC’s key tool in tackling water stress at the farm level. With the implementation of micro-irrigation under this component from 2015-16, the coverage of drip and sprinkler irrigation exceeds 30.69 lakh hectares. The programme has defined a target of 20 lakh hectares to be transformed every year from 2025-26 to 2029-30 and water-use efficiency to be improved to 75-95 per cent on-farm, which is a significant improvement from the approximate 35-40 per cent often found in conventional flood irrigation.

Soil Health Management and Soil Health Card Scheme

The Soil Health Card scheme with the motto Swasth Dharaa, Khet Haraa (Healthy Earth, Healthy Farm) is the most visible and farmer-friendly intervention of the mission, inaugurated on 19 February 2015 at Suratgarh, Rajasthan. The samples are taken on a grid, 2.5 ha for irrigated land and 10 ha for rainfed land, and tested for 12 parameters (nomenclature: macronutrients, micronutrients, pH, electrical conductivity, organic carbon) and translated into crop-specific fertiliser and soil-management advisories. 97.53 lakh soil samples were collected and 92.87 lakh were tested in FY 2025-26 alone, bringing the total number of Soil Health Cards generated to 25.79 crore till February 2026.

A NITI Aayog assessment in 2025 indicates that the scheme has contributed to correcting nutrient imbalances in Indian soils, notably by curbing over-usage of urea and the distortion of its usage through subsidy payments, and has had a positive impact on agricultural productivity where the advisories have been adhered to. The latter is important: several independent evaluations highlight that knowledge does not necessarily translate to equal action at the farm level, especially when the support from an extension service is less than optimal.

NICRA and Climate-Resilient Technology

ICAR has established a national programme on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) that acts as the research and technology pillar of the mission with four focuses: Strategic research, Technology demonstration, Sponsored/Competitive grants, and capacity building, which were started in 2010-11. NICRA has undertaken district-level climate vulnerability assessments in 651 predominantly agricultural districts following IPCC (check: have you mentioned its full form before writing it in short) protocols,and has recently completed a pilot project in 10 districts.

NICRA has undertaken a climate vulnerability assessment across 651 predominantly agricultural districts following the IPCC protocols and has just finished a pilot project in 10 districts. Of these, 310 districts were deemed vulnerable with 109 very highly vulnerable and 201 highly vulnerable, and District Agriculture Contingency Plans were prepared for these districts.

Impact

Figure 1: District-level climate vulnerability classification under the NICRA assessment. Source: ICAR/CRIDA, cited in Government of India press releases (December 2025).

On the ground, NICRA’s Climate Resilient Villages initiative has demonstrated stress-tolerant technologies, including the system of rice intensification, aerobic rice cultivation, direct seeding of rice, and zero-till wheat sowing, across 448 villages in 151 vulnerable districts, working through the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) network and Village Climate Risk Management Committees that finalise interventions through a participatory, panchayat-level process.

Between 2014 and 2025, the National Agricultural Research System led by ICAR released 2,996 climate-resilient crop varieties, complemented by agronomic practices such as stress-tolerant crop adoption and crop residue management. Field-level studies offer a granular picture of impact: in Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh, a NICRA intervention that renovated eleven community irrigation tanks and recharged 129 borewells was associated with yield gains ranging from 11.5 per cent in paddy to as much as 38 per cent in groundnut.

Figure 2: Selected NMSA implementation milestones, most recent reporting period (FY 2025-26). Compiled from PIB releases and departmental data.

Emerging Issues

After 10 years of development, NMSA can fairly be said to have had mixed and incomplete results, with many of the failures stemming not so much from the design of the model itself as from the chronic lack of institutional follow-through at the state and district levels and the under-resourcing of state and district agricultural programs. This is an ongoing issue of financing the education system.

One constraint that is almost always mentioned is financial. Independent estimates show that a mere 0.8 percent of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare budget goes to NMSA, a lot less than is proportionate to the size of the rainfed farming base it is supposed to cater for. Separate estimates of annual allocations against projected needs show that actual budgetary support usually only provides for about 60-70 per cent of the implementation plans, which has a cumulative impact and prohibits the mission from reaching the full geographic and demographic scope of its work.

Figure 3: NMSA’s share of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare budget. Source: Independent policy analysis, 2025

Absorption and Delivery Constraints

Underspending is the second challenge of underfunding. Unspent balances against sanctioned NMSA funds have been reported in several states, often due to administrative delays, a severe lack of trained technical staff at the block and district levels and poor institutional coordination between the agriculture and water resources and rural development departments that are needed for the integrated-farming model implemented by RAD. There have also been issues of field equity

e.g., research from Karnataka shows that while RAD and allied schemes are present, rainfed farmers say they face significant challenges in getting these benefits and the subsidies, research focus and infrastructure continue to be skewed toward irrigated fields and high-input cash crops. In some districts, this access gap has also resulted in farmers being more willing to rent their land to solar developers than to continue growing crops via rain-fed farming; although the mission’s founding intent was to help farmers access land for solar cultivation.

The Advisory-to-Adoption Gap

Another constraint is the gap between provision of information and change in behaviour. This is well demonstrated by the Soil Health Card scheme: 25.79 crore cards were generated and distributed, but multiple assessments show that this has not been consistently translated into changes in fertiliser and cropping practices, especially in regions where extension services are weak, farmer knowledge of technical advice on cards is low, and access to input markets for specific amendments recommended on the cards is also limited.

Way Forward

The last 10 years of NMSA practice provide clear guidance for the next decade of NMSA’s mission, several of which are implied by the above constraints.

• A greater proportion of financing to NMSA’s original mandate: A budget proportion of well under 1 per cent of the agriculture area is a major misallocation of funds relative to climate vulnerability, especially in rain-fed areas that cover 60 per cent of the net sown area, with a progressive increase in dedicated funding and stronger ring-fencing against reallocation to other umbrella components.
• In order to ensure that last-mile institutional capacity is built, investment in Krishi Vigyan Kendras, block-level technical staffing and inter-departmental coordination mechanisms are prerequisites for the successful implementation of the integrated farming model of RAD which is not just a collection of unlinked subsidies.

• The advisory-to-adoption gap needs to be addressed through digital and mobile agro-advisories, GIS mapping, and AI-facilitated decision support with existing KVK outreach, rather than just a one-time information transfer, through an advisory using a Soil Health Card. 
• Focus on equity in rainfed areas: Scheme design must actively work against the observed bias of subsidies, research focus, and infrastructure towards irrigated and cash crop areas, and towards a balanced allocation of the same area to rainfed and smallholder farmers. Expanding the Climate Resilient Villages model to more villages than 448, and better connecting DAPs with the flow of ICAR funds through RAD and PDMC, will facilitate increased on-farm uptake of the ICAR research.
• Enhance granularity of monitoring: In the context of NMSA being absorbed into successive umbrella schemes, there is a need for aggregated and disaggregated expenditure and outcome data from NMSAs which would be publicly reported and would enable for more precise monitoring of what works and what doesn’t, both for the policymaker and independent researcher.

Conclusion

In more than a decade, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture has evolved a truly holistic approach to climate-resilient agriculture that connects the dots between soil health, water-use efficiency, and integrated farming systems, and between climate research and the development of India’s farms. The measurable results it has produced are no less than over 25 crore Soil Health Cards, nearly 3,000 climate-resilient crop varieties and district-level vulnerability mapping throughout the country.

However, it is questions of institutional repositioning of NMSA from a standalone mission to a sub-mission and now a part of PM-RKVY, and the budget share which is an abysmally small share when compared to the sheer size of the rainfed farming base in India, that reveal that NMSA has served more as a coordinating and knowledge generation mechanism than as an adequately resourced delivery mechanism. With climate variability increasingly threatening the food and livelihood security of the nation, the policy challenge of the next phase of NMSA is not to redesign its architecture but to match its architecture with financing, staffing, and last-mile delivery, which are commensurate with its stated ambition.

References

Disaster.Shiksha. (2025, December 8). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture: Balancing productivity and ecology. https://disaster.shiksha/ecology-environment/national-mission-sustainable-agriculture/

Global Agriculture. (2025, December 8). Promotion of climate resilient agriculture. https://www.global-agriculture.com/india-region/promotion-of-climate-resilient-agriculture/

Government of Himachal Pradesh, Department of Agriculture. (n.d.). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) – Rainfed Area Development (RAD). https://agriculture.hp.gov.in/en/our-scheme/national-mission-for-sustainable-agriculture-nmsa/

IndiaFilings. (2025, July 14). National Innovations on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA). https://www.indiafilings.com/learn/national-innovations-on-climate-resilient-agriculture-nicra/

IndiaFilings. (2026, March 27). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA). https://www.indiafilings.com/learn/national-mission-for-sustainable-agriculture-nmsa/

Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. (n.d.). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture: Objectives. https://nmsa.dac.gov.in/frmObjectives.aspx

Newkerala.com. (2026, May 10). India releases 2,996 climate-resilient crop varieties. https://www.newkerala.com/news/a/india-released-nearly-3000-climate-resilient-crop-varieties-during-221.htm

Newsgram. (2025, November 23). India’s agricultural policies blamed for pollution, poor nutrition, and a deepening water crisis. https://www.newsgram.com/india/2025/11/23/indias-agricultural-policies-blamed-for-pollution

Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (n.d.). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) has been made operational from the year 2014-15. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1556469

Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (2026). National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture: Integrated policy interventions for climate-resilient agriculture. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?ModuleId=3&NoteId=158495

Responsible Us. (2025, July 17). Sowing sustainability: Evaluating India’s National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA). https://responsibleus.com/sowing-sustainability-evaluating-indias-national-mission-for-sustainable-agriculture-nmsa

Singh, A. P. (2025, October 29). India’s farm policies behind bad air, unhealthy diet, water crisis. The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/indias-farm-policies-behind-bad-air-unhealthy-diet-water-crisis/

Sreenivasulu, S., Sudhakar, P. S., Divya, V., Kumar, T. R., Prasad, J. V., & Meera, S. N. (2024). Impact of climate resilient technologies in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh. AGRIS (FAO). https://agris.fao.org/search/fr/records/66262fd25d1fb0ac4c6caf39

About the Contributor

Ayan Bordoloi is an intern with IMPRI, currently pursuing his master’s in political science at the University of Delhi. His research interests lie in federalism, tribal governance, and Northeast India’s political landscape.

Acknowledgements

The author extends sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their guidance and support, along with the reviewers Manish and Raushan Raj for their valuable feedback and insights.

Disclaimer:

All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization

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