My new readings are on artificial intelligence—the next big ‘discovery’ that humans are collectively and consciously committing themselves to. Its potential delights me. Yet, the fear of the unknown, of an unknown that can overpower every facet of life as we know it—is, well, terrifying to say the least. Take agriculture for example, the stricken sector of India’s economy, AI can redeem it all. The satellites up in sky, relaying information every few minutes, can forecast a multitude of things. Fishing forecasts, rain-sleet-hail-snow and myriad weather anomaly forecasts and crops forecasts are almost commonplace now. Farmers find themselves receiving upgraded and nuanced information, especially due to the increased penetration of smartphones. Laser levelling of land that allows equitable distribution of water in a farm is undertaken fairly ubiquitously nationwide. The stage seems set for precision agriculture with automated data loggers, optical sensors for detecting soil nutrients, sustainable irrigation sensors and more. Sensor bases technology, enabled through GPS and smartphone apps will help farmers decide the ‘what to do’ and ‘when to do’ in watering plants, adding nutrients, harvesting and most importantly linking to the market. On the whole it seems an environmentalists’ dream come true—with humongous reduction in wasteful practices. But, despite the upbeat sense of collective jurisprudence that precision agriculture is likely to provide—its overpowering reliance on so many allied technologies is disconcerting. When we have successfully de-skilled farmers—the few that will remain, in the art of farming, say with several generations of lost traditional knowledge, the way we have done with taxi-drivers of world urbanscape, would food security be under duress? Well, only future can tell.

We have brought to our readers a set of two back to back issues on agriculture. Considering that the sector is under grave threat, we needed to revisit it to understand the cause and effect of agrarian distress. I am deeply indebted to Professor R S Deshpande for guiding us through this special agriculture issue.