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By:

Parashram Patil

14 January 2026 at 8:49:45 pm

Crops of Conflict

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems intersect with...

Crops of Conflict

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems intersect with contested rivers, conflict and disrupted supply chains. For India, this presents not merely a humanitarian challenge but an opportunity to practise a more strategic form of food diplomacy. Clear Warning The Nile basin offers the clearest warning. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia depend heavily on the river, directly or indirectly, for agriculture and livelihoods. Egypt obtains roughly 90-95 percent of its water from the Nile, with most of its withdrawals going to agriculture. Wheat, rice, maize and cotton are therefore inseparable from the country's water security. Sudan is similarly dependent on the Main Nile and its Blue and White Nile tributaries for crops including sorghum, wheat, cotton and sugarcane. Ethiopia, by contrast, relies much more heavily on rain-fed agriculture, but the Blue Nile remains crucial to its plans for agricultural and economic expansion. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has transformed this already delicate equation. The Blue Nile supplies roughly 85 percent of the Nile's runoff, giving Ethiopia substantial geographical leverage upstream. Egypt and Sudan, downstream and more dependent on the river, have consequently viewed the dam through the prism of food and water security. The dispute has its roots partly in the 1959 agreement that allocated Nile waters between Egypt and Sudan, but the rise of Ethiopia as a major upstream power has altered the political balance. The stakes are enormous. A disruption to water availability is not simply an environmental problem when millions depend on irrigated agriculture. It can affect food prices, livelihoods, migration and political stability. Across the basin, the consequences potentially extend to hundreds of millions of people. The lesson is straightforward: rivers can become geopolitical infrastructure, and crops can become strategic assets. Critical Role This is where India can play a useful role. Its longstanding diplomatic, commercial and maritime links with Africa give it an established platform. Its experience in producing wheat, rice and millets, meanwhile, gives it something more tangible: the ability to contribute to food-supply resilience. Egypt, for instance, remains heavily dependent on imports and is projected to require around 13 million tonnes of wheat imports to bridge its consumption gap. Sudan’s agricultural crisis is still more acute. Conflict and climate stress have sharply reduced cereal production, leaving output well below recent historical averages. India could therefore build food diplomacy around two complementary tracks. The first is supply. Predictable grain arrangements and strategic food buffers could help vulnerable countries absorb shocks in international markets. The second is technology. India's experience with micro-irrigation, precision farming and water-use efficiency offers tools that may help African farmers produce more with less water. The Per Drop More Crop component of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana is one example. Drip irrigation, improved canal management, seepage reduction and precision agriculture cannot resolve a dispute over the Nile, but they can reduce the amount of water required to produce a given crop. For this to become a durable strategy, however, India will need to move beyond individual projects. Bilateral agricultural agreements with African countries could be converted into longer-term trade corridors and grain-supply arrangements. Multilateral platforms, including BRICS, could provide mechanisms for greater transparency in food distribution and market stabilisation. Seed exchanges could focus on drought-tolerant millets, biofortified wheat and heat-resistant maize suited to increasingly volatile climates. Indian private enterprise could be brought into this architecture. Agritech startups and Farmer-Producer Organisations could be encouraged to enter African markets through export-linked grants, incubation programmes and risk-sharing mechanisms. EXIM Bank credit lines and export guarantees could reduce the financial risks of deploying solar cold chains, irrigation systems and agricultural technologies in politically volatile markets. Public-private partnerships could also help Indian firms adapt AI-based crop advisory systems and IoT-enabled water sensors to African soils and farming practices. The larger opportunity is strategic. India’s relationship with Africa need not be confined to trade, infrastructure or diplomatic declarations. Agriculture offers a practical form of South-South cooperation in which food, technology and water efficiency reinforce one another. (The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.

Indian students strike gold

Writer: Abhijit Mulye
Abhijit Mulye
Jul 20
2 min read

Mumbai: India’s brightest young scientific minds have once again proven their mettle on the global stage, securing exceptional medal hauls at two of the world’s most prestigious science competitions for secondary school students. Showcasing unprecedented academic prowess, the Indian delegation brought home a historic all-gold sweep at the 58th International Chemistry Olympiad in Uzbekistan, alongside an impressive haul of one gold and three silver medals at the 37th International Biology Olympiad in Lithuania.


These stellar performances cement India’s position as a powerhouse of STEM talent, reflecting the rigorous training and dedication cultivated by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) and a nationwide network of educators, said national coordinator of Science Olympiads Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar.


In a landmark achievement, all four students representing India at the International Chemistry Olympiad, held in Tashkent from July 10 to 19, bagged gold medals. This marks India’s first-ever all-gold sweep in the history of the competition. The victorious quartet includes Debadatta Priyadarshi from Bhubaneswar, Harshit Singla from Mandi Gobindgarh, Kabeer Chillar from Delhi, and Sandeep Kuchi from Hyderabad. This year’s event was the largest to date, featuring 363 students from 93 countries.


India’s flawless performance tied the nation for the top spot in the country-wise medals tally, sharing the first position with China, Vietnam, and an individual participant from Russia. The students navigated highly complex experimental and theoretical tasks, including decoding the composition of historical and natural artifacts, calculating the mass of uranium used in a 1966 detonation, and performing advanced pH-metric titrations. The team was guided by Head Mentor Professor Subhajit Bandyopadhyay, Mentor Dr. Indrani Sen, and Scientific Observers Dr. Anubendu Adhikary and Dr. Jayasree Gopalakrishnan.


Running concurrently in Vilnius from July 12 to 19, the International Biology Olympiad saw the Indian team secure one gold and three silver medals against a highly competitive field of 307 students from 78 nations. Bhavyaa Gunwal from Mahendragarh clinched the gold medal, while Soumil Maity from Howrah, Nishit Kalani from Pali, and Anmol Kumar from Mansa each brought home silver. The biology competition pushed the boundaries of secondary education with a gruelling six-hour theoretical exam and an intensive six-hour practical laboratory test designed by the Vilnius University Life Sciences Centre. In the labs, students executed complex molecular biology tasks like restriction digestion, evaluated the pharmacokinetics of aspirin, performed precise insect morphology dissections, and utilized cutting-edge digital software for plant transcriptome analysis. The delegation was led by Professor Rekha Vartak and Dr. Anupama Ronad, alongside Scientific Observers Dr. Ranjithsinh Devkar and Dr. Siddhesh Ghag.

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