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Overview

Our support to India focuses on a regional collaborative approach involving neighbouring countries with shared issues and opportunities. Our key research programs focus on crops and water and climate.

The ACIAR country strategy remains committed to the management of agricultural water, sustainable intensification and diversification of cropping systems, breeding improved varieties of crops and assisted policy development for farmers' livelihoods and climate change.

Country priorities 

  • Continuing sustainable intensification with a nutrition framework.
  • Strengthening the diversification into new dry season crops.
  • Improving the the role of biotechnology for higher nutritive value feed oil enriched crops.
  • Creating new mechanisation opportunities including farm robotics.
  • Introducing the next phase of mungbean breeding for high yielding varieties 
  • Monitoring groundwater management (over and under exploitation)
  • Continuing co-investment and trilateral collaboration

Active projects by program area

Country manager
Regional Manager South Asia

Dr Pratibha Singh

Pratibha is based in New Delhi, India. Before joining ACIAR in 2018, Pratibha was head of the Technology Advancement Unit of the Indo–Swiss Collaboration in Biotechnology for eight years. She has 20 years’ experience in crop research and technology management, including more than 10 years of research experience in molecular plant pathology on crops, including wheat, rice, corn and potato. Pratibha worked at: the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi; USDA–Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center; Cornell University; and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Fredericton. She also worked as a scientist and Coordinator of Research Management System in a corporate biotech industry (E.I. DuPont India). Pratibha is qualified in agriculture and animal husbandry, and holds a Master of Agriculture Biotechnology from G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, India, and a PhD in Agriculture, with a major in plant pathology as a Monbusho Scholar from Tottori University, Japan.

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