Integrated Whitefly [Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius)] Management In Bt-Cotton in North India: An Agroecosystem-Wide Community-Based Approach

In 2015, a whitefly epidemic devastated cotton in about 1.5 m ha in North India and reduced the yield level to about 35% of average productivity in the state of Punjab. Protection of crop from sucking insect pests, including whitefly, is primarily based on insecticides. A more knowledgeintensive and multidisciplinary approach which can lead to a dramatic reduction in chemical use combined with unprecedented improvement in productivity should qualify as a worthy successor to the green revolution. Interventions include host plant resistance, robust surveillance and ETLbased decision-making, managing non-crop hosts, pest resurgence curtailment through targeted biopesticide and pesticide application, crop nutrition, and abiotic stress amelioration. Research refinements even as implementation progressed, high intensity outreach and cotton belt-wide implementation not just restored productivity, but also resulted in achieving record yields of 756, 750 and 778 kg lint/ha in 2016, 2017 and 2018 respectively, compared with 197 kg lint/ha in 2015 in Punjab, and pesticide savings during these years over 2015 were INR 2589/ha, 2808/ha and 3060/ha respectively. The success story and its modus operandi have implications for ‘new agriculture’, which needs to be disseminated and debated widely.