The Research Node is designing scalable and flexible cyber-infrastructure to accommodate the customised acquisition, processing, storage, integration, display, and analysis of different types of data at multiple spatial and temporal resolutions as well as across different formats. The Data Centre will enable data sharing and provide customised datasets for analysis to researchers collaborating with the Research Node. The availability of high-quality processed data products will be a huge attraction for researchers who need to integrate data from multiple sources with different units of measurement and frequency. The Centre will also provide focused services to RRAN partners, with an emphasis on Comprehensive Pilot sites. Please check the Data Centre tab for detailed information.

The Research Node conducts fellowship programmes to engage junior researchers and build an ecosystem of scholars working on rainfed agriculture. These fellowships will place selected applicants for short-term fieldwork in CP sites on relevant topics. Our first Summer Fellowship concluded in August 2015, with 13 fellows from 11 Universities conducting fieldwork for 11 weeks in five CP sites. Doctoral Fellowships will be announced in the near future. Please check the Fellowships tab to get detailed information on our summer fellowships and on how to apply for the next round.

Baseline Data collection is underway in 150 villages across 6 Indian states. We are collecting information on all public and civic institutions in the selected villages, and data on soil health, forest vegetation, water quality and quantity, energy use, and infrastructure. The data will help us understand the diversity of livelihood systems in rainfed areas and the role of institutions in enabling adaptive responses that lead to improvements in well-being and human development. The data will enable both a better identification of interventions in CP villages, and impact evaluation of these interventions. Please check the Baseline Data tab for more information.

Data Center

Centre for Data Integration and Compilation: The Data Centre caters to a wide range of constituents with data needs. These include RRAN Partners, external researchers, policy makers, interested citizens and lay persons. The availability of high-quality processed data products will be a huge attraction for researchers, both junior and senior. One of the biggest obstacles to analysis is the time and effort it takes to clean and prepare data taken from primary sources. Even the best sources, such as Census of India, do not provide data in a form that is directly amenable to analysis. On top of that, researchers usually need to integrate data from multiple sources with different units of measurement and frequency, exacerbating the obstacles.

The Research Node has already acquired several publicly-available datasets. We provide a data service to researchers interested in working on questions of relevance to RRAN. The Data Centre can integrate data brought in by researchers with its own datasets, or process it for them. In the short term, the Data Centre can act as a clearing house for national or state-level datasets. In the medium term, the centre will become a hub for researchers interested in issues of interest to RRAN.

The Data Centre will enable data sharing and provide customised datasets for analysis to interested researchers. The Data Centre is working on a web-based interactive data visualisation portal for RRAN, starting with an Atlas of Rainfed Areas.

In addition to external researchers, the Data Centre will also provide focused services to RRAN partners, with an emphasis on Comprehensive Pilot sites. For example, several datasets have already been put together for the Rainfed Atlas, which CP partners can draw from. The Thematic Nodes are also collecting primary data in CP sites, which will be stored in a common spatially-integrated database. Eventually, the Data Centre will be able to support all data service requests related to RRAN activities in CP sites, as well as acquire and provide external data to support such activities.

Baseline Data

The Research Node is collecting primary data on rainfed livelihoods across different agroecological and agroclimatic zones in India. The data collected through this exercise, after processing and removing household identifiers, will be open access and made freely available to all researchers. Data is being collected in seven sites across six states in India, in Odisha (Malkangiri District), West Bengal (Bankura District), Jharkhand (Palamau District), Madhya Pradesh (Burhanpur and Dewas Districts), Gujarat (Kutchh District), and Telangana (Mahbubnagar District). Primary data is being collected in approximately 20 villages in each site, and a sample of 15-50 households within each village, in addition to information on all civic and public institutions active in the village, as well as data on soil, water, vegetation, and physical infrastructure. The Research Node is analyzing the preliminary data and we will share some of the first emerging trends here soon.

Research questions and data collection framework We seek to characterise rainfed livelihoods as complex adaptive systems comprising linked agricultural production, labour market, natural resources, and public investment sub-systems. Livelihood systems result from household responses to risks and opportunities, structured by a web of institutional relationships. Our research questions seek to understand the diversity of livelihood systems in rainfed areas, the capacity of households to respond to risks and opportunities, and the role of institutions in enabling adaptive responses that lead to improvements in well-being and human development.

These livelihood systems manifest self-organisation, and our data collection methodology takes this property into account by addressing the multiplicity of scales at which outcomes can manifest themselves.

The specific research questions are as follows:

  1. How do public institutions and policies affecting water management, energy provision, and food production impact the ability of households and communities to deal with climate risks?

  2. What synergies exist between public policies for water (soil moisture management and protective irrigation), energy (access to firewood and alternatives), and food (production and subsidised foodgrains) sectors?

1.What institutional innovations from local to national levels can help enhance water-energy-food synergies, especially through cross-sectoral integration of public programmes and investments? Most importantly, the sub-systems cannot be meaningfully evaluated on their own, without reference to their contribution to the whole livelihood system.

Data collection using mobile devices will ultimately cover ~250 villages, over 10,000 households, information on all public and civic institutions in the villages, and data on soil health, forest vegetation, water quality and quantity, and energy use. This primary data will be combined with relevant secondary data (agricultural variables like production, area, yield, cropping pattern; biophysical indicators like rainfall, temperature, tree cover, topography; public investments like fertiliser subsidies, minimum support prices, irrigation infrastructure).

The data collection instruments are being designed as part of a larger package that includes an android-based data entry application, cloud-based data storage, a data quality control application to flag data inconsistencies in real time, and a web-based data analytics programme that combines primary data with relevant secondary data to summarise and/or visualise relationships of interest. All of these will be developed in parallel so as to maximise synergies.

We envision four kinds of ‘data’ to address the research questions:

  1. Livelihood sub-system features

  2. Thinking of livelihoods as comprised of diversified portfolios of benefit streams (not only monetary) as sub-systems – crops, livestock, wagelabour, NTFPs, small processing, trade and services, etc.

  3. Series of socio-political, institutional, and ecological parameters for each sub-system (diversity, variability, productivity, constraints, dependence, seasonality, access to information and material).

  4. Household choices in terms of crops or assets driven by considerations of increasing total income (price signal, quantity), risk aversion (volatility, variability), and peer pressure (norms, social structure and networks).

  5. Connections between sub-systems

  6. A network perspective on how the multiple livelihood sub-systems fit together, in order to identify feedback loops and patterns of cross-dependence, at both the household and village/landscape level.

  7. Sub-systems as connected to each other through direct and indirect linkages, embedded in the larger agroecological landscape.

  8. Data on flows of information, energy, biomass, resources, labor, and influence between livelihood sub-systems.

  9. Risks to sub-systems (and opportunities)

  10. Sources of risks/opportunities – climate variability, public policies, health vectors (human, crop, and animal), wildlife, etc.

  11. Nature of risk and its match toprevalent practices for mitigation – mobility, storage, pooling, diversification, exchange.

  12. Unintended consequences of interventions to improve one dimension – decrease variability or increase output – as trade-offs between risks and opportunities spread unequally across households and communities.

  13. Policies and institutions (formal and informal) that structure incentives and shape behaviour

  14. Patterns of property rights to natural resources – land, water, forest, pasture, etc.

  15. Access to public and civic institutions(government departments, cooperatives, self-help groups, banks, NGOs, etc.), and provision of social security and welfare services (PDS, primary health care, ICDS, MGNREGA, etc.)

  16. Social networks and patterns of reciprocity, including history and practice of collective action for resource management and mechanisms for conflict resolution.

  17. Relationship of households to elected representatives and institutions, level of representation of local preferences at higher levels of administration.

Fellowships

RRAN is pleased to announce the conclusion of the first Summer Fellowship programme to conduct field research in India during the summer of 2015.

Please contact Prachee Sinha at rran-summerfellows (at) rainfedindia.org for any additional questions.

For detailed information, please visit our website.

Click here for more details on RRAN Fellowships of 2016.

RRAN summer fellowships 2016

Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRAN) is pleased to announce a fellowship programme to conduct field research in India during the summer of 2016.

RRAN is a network of NGOs, scholars, and practitioners involved in the development of rainfed agriculture in India, with ongoing interventions and data collection efforts in sites across six Indian states (Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Odisha, West Bengal, Telangana, and Jharkhand). We characterise rainfed livelihoods as complex adaptive systems comprising linked agricultural production, labour market, natural resources, and public investment sub-systems. Rainfed areas account for 60% of net sown area in India, yet they have gained little from dominant strategies of agricultural development, especially those associated with the green revolution. As such, these areas continue to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition.

Our research programme seeks to understand the diversity of livelihood systems in rainfed areas and the role of public investments in enabling adaptive responses that lead to improvements in well-being and human development. Our objective is to enable the development of more effective public interventions, both by creating an evidence base for policy advocacy and by leading to more informed interventions of our partner organisations on the ground.

The summer fellowship will provide the opportunity for Master’s and early-stage PhD students to participate in this exciting research agenda by conducting case studies in RRAN field sites relating to one of three research themes. The research will contribute towards RRAN’s knowledge base, feeding directly into the grassroots efforts of our partner organisations to better link public investments with the needs of local farming communities. In so doing, fellows will have the opportunity to design and implement a research project, while interacting with and learning from leading researchers.

Each fellow will produce a paper, based on the research conducted during the fellowship, to be published as part of our working papers series, and we also hope to curate edited volumes or special journal issues based on this body of work. We also expect that this opportunity will provide experience in both fieldwork and research design that will help to advance the fellows’ broader career trajectory. More generally, we envision that the fellowship programme will help to foster a community of emerging scholars working on agriculture and livelihoods in rainfed regions of India and build productive linkages between our partner organizations and a broader academic community.

  • For any questions, please email Prachee Sinha at rran-summerfellows (at) rainfedindia.org