Khet Bachao Abhiyan to launch from Raisen

A nationwide soil-health and balanced-fertiliser campaign begins 1 June 2026 from Madhya Pradesh, run by the Agriculture Ministry through the KVK–ICAR network.

What happened

• The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare announced that the Khet Bachao Abhiyan (literally, "Save the Farm Field Campaign") will be launched nationally on 1 June 2026 from Ramsiya village in Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh.
• Ahead of the launch, the Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare and Rural Development held a virtual interaction with Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), ICAR institutions, agricultural universities, and senior agricultural officials of the Central and State Governments.
• The Centre framed it not as an ordinary departmental programme but as a national campaign built on public participation, a scientific approach, and a sense of shared responsibility to "protect Mother Earth".
• The Minister said he had spoken with the Chief Ministers of all States to seek their participation, and appealed to Union Ministers and public representatives to associate with the drive.
• A detailed roadmap running up to 30 June 2026 is to be prepared, specifying which officer, scientist, institution or team visits which village on which date, with district-level programmes planned in advance and dashboard-based monitoring.
• The Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare Secretary and the ICAR Director General, along with Vice-Chancellors of agricultural universities and KVK scientists, took part in the interaction.

Background & context

The campaign sits within the long-running effort of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare to repair the country's degrading soil base. The official framing names the drivers directly: rising temperatures, the indiscriminate and imbalanced use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, deterioration of soil health, and a deepening climate crisis. India's fertiliser-use pattern has long been skewed — urea (nitrogen) is heavily subsidised and over-applied, while phosphatic and potassic nutrients and micronutrients are under-used, distorting the soil nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium (N-P-K) balance. Khet Bachao Abhiyan is positioned as an awareness-and-outreach push to correct that behaviour at the village level rather than a new funding scheme.

Importantly, the Abhiyan is designed as an umbrella mobilisation that channels farmers toward existing schemes rather than creating a fresh entitlement. The release explicitly anchors it to a family of established interventions: the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) for farm credit, Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) for direct income support, the Crop Insurance Scheme (the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana family), the Soil Health Card scheme, Mini Seed Kits, the Pulses and Oilseeds Mission, and Agricultural Mechanisation programmes. The campaign's job is to ensure these benefits actually reach the farmer at the field, with publicity and outreach singled out for special emphasis.

The Soil Health Card scheme — to which this Abhiyan is closely tied — was launched in 2015 and provides farmers a crop-wise report of soil nutrient status with recommendations on the dosage of nutrients and fertilisers to apply, the diagnostic backbone for the "balanced fertiliser use" the campaign promotes. Natural farming, also a campaign focus, has its own dedicated national programme promoting chemical-free, livestock-based cultivation, and the campaign's emphasis on it reflects the wider policy tilt toward reducing chemical-input dependence.

The delivery machinery the campaign mobilises is itself worth knowing. Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) are district-level farm-science centres, hosted by ICAR institutes, State agricultural universities, NGOs and other bodies, that carry research to the field through on-farm trials, frontline demonstrations and farmer training. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), an autonomous body under the Department of Agricultural Research and Education in the same Ministry, is the apex coordinator of agricultural research and education in the country and oversees this KVK network alongside its research institutes. By routing the campaign through this existing extension architecture — ICAR, KVKs, State agricultural universities and State agriculture departments together — the government avoids building parallel machinery and instead uses the channels already trusted at the village level.

Among the linked schemes, the contrast with PM-KISAN is instructive. PM-KISAN, launched in 2019, is a central-sector income-support scheme paying eligible landholding farmer families a fixed annual amount in equal instalments directly into bank accounts; it is money flowing to the farmer. Khet Bachao Abhiyan, by contrast, transfers no money — it is knowledge, awareness and a referral to those very schemes. The Kisan Credit Card, introduced in 1998, gives farmers timely and affordable short-term credit for cultivation; the campaign's role is simply to widen its uptake. Understanding that one is a campaign and the others are standing schemes is the distinction UPSC most often tests.

The campaign's village-launch model — beginning from a single named village (Ramsiya in Raisen) and radiating outward through a dated, officer-mapped roadmap — mirrors the saturation-and-outreach approach used in other recent government mobilisations such as developed-village and farmer-outreach drives, where a fixed window, a dashboard, and assigned responsibility for each location are used to drive measurable coverage in a short period. The choice of Madhya Pradesh, a large agrarian State, as the launch ground reinforces the soil-and-fertiliser theme at the heart of the drive.

For Prelims

• Name & meaning: Khet Bachao Abhiyan — "Save the Farm Field Campaign"; a soil-health and balanced-fertiliser mass-awareness drive.
• Nodal body: Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare, delivered through ICAR, KVKs, agricultural universities, and State agriculture departments.
• Launch: 1 June 2026, from Ramsiya village, Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh.
• Roadmap window: launch through 30 June 2026, with pre-planned district programmes, village-level demonstrations, and dashboard-based monitoring.
• Core focus areas: balanced fertiliser use · soil testing · Soil Health Cards · natural farming · crop selection · water conservation · green manuring · alternative practices for low-rainfall conditions.
• Quality-control angle: identification of counterfeit / fake fertilisers, seeds and pesticides.
• Linked schemes (the family to remember): KCC · PM-KISAN · Crop Insurance (PMFBY family) · Soil Health Card · Mini Seed Kits · Pulses & Oilseeds Mission · Agricultural Mechanisation.
• Delivery model: Centre + States + ICAR + agricultural universities + KVKs + public representatives + students + farmer-support organisations, working jointly.

Why it matters

The campaign targets one of Indian agriculture's quiet, structural problems: the slow degradation of soil health under decades of skewed fertiliser use. When the N-P-K balance is distorted and micronutrients are depleted, the same quantity of fertiliser yields progressively less grain — input costs rise while productivity stagnates, squeezing farm incomes and pushing cultivation onto a chemical treadmill. By foregrounding soil testing, Soil Health Cards, green manuring and natural farming, the Abhiyan tries to shift farmer behaviour toward nutrient efficiency before the loss becomes irreversible.

The framing also links soil health to the broader climate and water story. Rising temperatures, erratic and low rainfall, and falling water tables make soil organic matter and water conservation central to resilience, not optional extras. The inclusion of alternative practices for low-rainfall conditions and water conservation signals that the campaign treats the field as a coupled soil-and-water system. The attack on counterfeit fertilisers, seeds and pesticides addresses a parallel harm — spurious inputs that defraud farmers and damage both crop and soil — that rarely gets headline attention.

Finally, the design itself is instructive: rather than launching yet another stand-alone scheme, the government is using a short, high-visibility, jointly-owned campaign to improve the last-mile uptake of schemes that already exist. The success metric is whether the benefits of KCC, PM-KISAN, crop insurance and Soil Health Cards actually reach the farmer — a governance-and-delivery question as much as an agronomic one.

There is also a federal dimension. Agriculture is a State subject under the Constitution, so any nationwide farm drive depends on State buy-in to succeed — which is why the Minister's outreach to every Chief Minister, and the explicit inclusion of State agriculture departments and State agricultural universities in the delivery chain, is not a formality but a structural necessity. The campaign therefore doubles as a test of cooperative federalism in the farm sector: the Centre supplies the frame, the scientific institutions supply the content, and the States supply the on-ground reach without which the drive cannot land in the village. The emphasis on green manuring and crop selection further ties the effort to climate-resilient cropping, nudging farmers away from water- and chemical-intensive patterns in stressed regions.

For Mains