Public Policy Dialogues

Civil society is a critical, often under-recognised, force shaping India’s food systems by bridging communities and institutions, surfacing lived realities, and strengthening accountability. This panel explores how civil society organisations, community collectives, philanthropy, and citizen networks can accelerate food systems transformation across nutrition, livelihoods, and climate resilience. The discussion will examine civil society’s roles in enabling last-mile delivery and inclusion; generating evidence through participatory research, community monitoring, and social audits; driving behaviour change and risk communication on diets, food safety, and climate shocks; and convening partnerships that align Policy, Markets, and Culture at local and state levels. Panellists will also debate practical constraints such as funding cycles, regulatory environments, data access, and coordination challenges, and identify ways to scale what works without losing trust or context. The panel aims to clarify where civil society adds unique value and how collaboration with government, markets, and research can build more equitable, resilient food systems.

Consumer awareness about the provenance, quality, and safety of food is rising rapidly. People increasingly want to know not only what they eat, but who grows their food, where it comes from, and how it is cultivated. This shift creates a pivotal opportunity to harness market forces to drive systemic change toward sustainability and equity across Indiaʼs food system. Yet awareness alone does not translate into impact. For markets to genuinely reward nature-positive practices, we need robust infrastructure that builds and protects consumer trust. This panel will examine the role of rigorous testing protocols, credible standards, and end-to-end traceability systems in enabling verified claims—across nutrition, safety, and environmental performance. It will also explore how verification can strengthen price signals, reduce greenwashing, and improve incentives for farmers and enterprises adopting sustainable methods. Ultimately, the discussion asks: how do we design market systems where nutritional diversity, ecological health, and economic viability reinforce rather than contradict each other?

The panel, 'Four Axes of Food Systems: Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar, aur Sanchar', frames India’s food system as an interconnected ecosystem shaped by society, the state, markets, and communication. Samaaj explores how culture, diets, gender roles, and lived realities influence what people eat, what they can access, and what they trust. Sarkaar examines governance—how policy design, public procurement, safety nets, and regulation can align incentives for nutrition, sustainability, and resilience. Bazaar focuses on value chains: pricing, trade, finance, and private innovation that determine viability for farmers and affordability for consumers. Sanchar highlights the power of information—behaviour change, risk communication, digital platforms, and narratives that shape demand, reduce misinformation, and improve transparency from farm to fork. Together, the four axes offer a systems lens to diagnose trade-offs, surface blind spots, and identify levers for coordinated action that strengthens nutrition, livelihoods, and climate resilience. By mapping interactions and trade-offs across these axes, the panel will surface blind spots and identify practical levers for coordinated action toward a more equitable, climate-resilient food system.

India’s food systems are governed through multiple ministries and schemes spanning agriculture, nutrition, health, climate, food processing, and social protection. While programme-level convergence has improved over the years, structural governance challenges persist: siloed institutional mandates, fragmented data systems, input-based budgeting, and limited accountability for nutrition and resilience outcomes.  

As India advances toward long-term development goals, food systems governance must shift from coordination meetings to institutional redesign — aligning fiscal incentives, procurement patterns, digital infrastructure, and district-level planning authority.  This panel brings together senior leaders to deliberate on how governance architecture can enable system transformation rather than incremental convergence.   

Key transformation areas include structural reforms that formalise inter-ministerial and centre-state alignment beyond simple reviews, alongside fiscal and procurement shifts to incentivise nutrition-sensitive, sustainable agriculture. This requires leveraging Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for outcome-based accountability and driving localised empowerment by embedding food systems into district-level planning. Finally, achieving climate-nutrition synergy is essential, ensuring resilience indicators are integrated directly into the core of food governance. 

At the heart of food systems transformation lies the question of state capacity—its design, depth, adaptability, and coherence across levels of governance. In recent years, both the Government of India and State Governments have accelerated policy initiatives aimed at climate adaptation, mitigation, and structural reform. Yet, even as policy ambition has grown, translating vision into institutional alignment and sustained implementation across ministries, departments, and tiers of government remains a formidable challenge. This high-level roundtable will examine what it takes to enable a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to Food Systems Transformation (FST). The discussion will surface institutional enablers and disablers, interdisciplinary linkages, and the key known unknowns and unknown unknowns shaping this transition. The roundtable will explore priority research areas to guide short, medium, and long-term capacity-building and immediate institutional priorities and technical assistance needs at the central and state levels. The discussions will include lessons from past policy experiences including failures, especially failures alongside emerging field innovations that may define future pathways.

This roundtable addresses India’s ‘triple burden’ of malnutrition: the paradox of calorie sufficiency alongside micronutrient deficiencies and rising NCDs. As climate change threatens crop yields and nutrient density, the session advocates for a shift from mere Food Security to Nutritional Security. 

The discussion focuses on dismantling silos between scientific evidence and public policy through four strategic pillars: 

• Climate Resilience: Moving beyond the ‘Rice-Wheat’ duopoly toward diversified, nutrition-sensitive agriculture. 
• The ASF Nexus: Balancing the scale-up of dairy, fisheries, and poultry with environmental sustainability. 
• Urban Regulation: Addressing the rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) through science-backed labelling and FSSAI regulations. 
• Lab-to-Land Gap: Utilising the voluntary sector to translate complex dietary guidelines into culturally appropriate local habits. 
  
  

By integrating soil health, agricultural subsidies, and consumer choice, the panel aims to create a roadmap for a Suposhit Bharat (well-nourished India). The ultimate goal is a food system by 2047 that is diverse, climate-resilient, and driven by ‘Nutritional Intelligence.’ 

Agriculture supports 46% of India’s workforce but contributes roughly ~14% of national GHG emissions. It remains trapped in a structural paradox: resource-intensive production erodes the natural capital essential for long-term security. Farmers often face a ‘trade-off tax,’ choosing ‘survival emissions’ to guarantee harvests against climate risks. 

Research from NITI Aayog and CEEW indicates that scaling nine transformation pathways could deliver ~25% mitigation co-benefits by 2070. This evidence shows that mitigation is a natural byproduct of resilience, yet current policies like the National Mission on Natural Farming remain siloed. 

To achieve a Viksit Bharat by 2047 and Net-Zero by 2070, this roundtable addresses two primary goals: strengthening long-term evidence for an adaptation-led mitigation framework to effectively manage 50-year trade-offs and defining an integrated roadmap—ranging from risk assessments to spatial opportunities—to bridge existing knowledge gaps. 

By testing these pathways, the discussion aims to deliver a shared framework for a resilient, net-zero food system. 

Nutrition is central to the Sustainable Development Agenda, yet it is often treated as an implicit byproduct of agricultural productivity and economic growth rather than an explicit objective. This assumption has led to persistent malnutrition even as production increases. The crisis is now compounded by climate change, which disrupts supply chains and food prices, directly threatening the availability and affordability of nutritious food for vulnerable populations. In this context, agrifood systems represent the critical interface where climate risks transform into nutrition risks.

In collaboration with GAIN, this roundtable aims to move nutrition from an ‘implicit’ to an ‘intentional’ goal by bridging the structural gap between climate action and nutrition security. By convening experts across policy, research, and practice, the session will identify practical pathways to integrate these objectives. The focus will be on aligning policies, strengthening data systems, and coordinating financing to build resilient food systems that deliberately deliver superior nutrition outcomes despite an increasingly unpredictable climate.