The meeting was organized at NIASM, Malegaon, Baramati on 18^th January 2021 at 3:30 pm. Dr S.K. Choudhary, Deputy Director General (NRM), ICAR, New Delhi chaired the meeting. Scientists from ICAR and DAN core group members participated in the meeting. The meeting was initiated by Dr H. Pathak, Director, NIASM with a brief introduction about the DAN and the objectives of the meeting. Mr Suhas Joshi, Head Sustainability & Business Stewardship, Bayer South Asia emphasized the need for collaboration between ICAR institutes and other stakeholders to evolve robust plans to reduce farmers distress in drought prone areas. Dr Choudhary in his introductory remarks appreciated the initiatives of DAN and extended cooperation needed from ICAR institutes for achieving the goals to reduce farmers’ distress. He suggested that the aim of the DAN should be to develop a robust system for action to reduce losses caused by drought in Maharashtra, which can set an example for other states of India. Ideas for implementation in three areas for interventions chosen by DAN core team were presented in the meeting by ICAR, SAU and DAN members. 

From discussion the following suggestions emerged for consideration.

Suggestions

1. To start with, one or two representative districts of Maharashtra may be chosen to develop the drought action plans, which can be extended to other districts at later stages.
2. Water, soil carbon, energy balance and land use plans to be integrated to evolve adaption and mitigation solutions for agricultural drought.
3. In addition to rice, resource intensive crops like sugarcane should be included in the target crop for developing drought action plan.
4. For early warning system, existing tools to be validated and the gaps if any have to be delineated before venturing into new ones.
5. District real time contingency plans to be updated and will be useful form-how to utilize this information should be part of the plan.
6. Targets in terms of representative sites/watershed, stakeholders (farmers, or agri department), crops, and concepts (resource use, early warning, and environmental health) for climate resilience and drought coping should be clearly defined.
7. Methods to be followed to implement and monitor the plans to be discussed in advance so that resources necessary for the implementation of plans can be assessed.
8. Any information technology emerging should be simple cheap so that upscaling is easy and implementable.
9. Vulnerable areas of Pune District to be identified to address the problems at block level as district level contingency plans are available at present.
10. All the plans and the contribution of DAN partners to be interconnected to arrive at logical end required to solve farmers distress and they should not appear as independent project.