**4. Discussion**

Despite growing economically, Indians are still hugely dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. Floods have been a major natural disaster (along with droughts) which impacts Indian agriculture sector heavily. Between 1950–2020, India had 304 major flood events, which affected around 895 million people in the country and cost USD 84 billion [1]. With exacerbating changes in global climate, the severity and intensity of floods will likely increase further. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find ways to adapt to floods and secure poor and smallholder farmers' livelihood. With technological advancement, scientists have developed several viable and stress-tolerant seed varieties which can withstand disasters such as floods and droughts. Given the availability of such seed technologies, there is still a need to understand the amount of seeds required by farmers. With this regard, this study explored the amount of flood-tolerant seeds of the *Swarna-Sub 1* rice variety that would be required by rice cultivators (during the monsoon season) at the district level of India's 17 major states. The estimates reveal an overall requirement of 92,764 tonnes of SS1 rice variety for the flood-affected *Kharif*-paddy areas across all the states. In monetary terms, this would cost approximately 370 crore INR (or USD 53 million) to the exchequer. Considering the government's total spending on the agriculture sector, USD 53 million amounts to less than 0.01 percent of the Indian central government's budget allocation to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare in 2020. These estimates can

be benefited by potential private sector investors at the regional, national and international level, and stakeholders in the seed sector, while making decisions focusing on flood-risk management in agriculture. While great progress has been made in developing advanced flood-tolerant seed varieties, the question remains if these estimates are viable considering if the government or private sector can establish a seed distribution system to ensure all the flood-affected farmers benefit from this.

Focusing on climate change adaptation, an immediate focus should be given to the agriculture areas which are severely affected by floods annually. As noted earlier, around 12 to 14 million ha of rain-fed rice cultivation area could be benefited if the SS1 variety was adopted by the farmers, as it offers better yield even during flood events [21]. With regards to SS1 s adoption and awareness amongst the farmers in India, it can be noted that these seeds have been distributed to farmers, especially in eastern India, since 2008. Since then, the distribution of SS1 seeds has expanded significantly, in particular when the National Food Security Mission, which is a central government initiative to increase the annual production of rice, wheat and pulses, included these seeds in its eastern India programs in 2010 [19,24]. From 2010–2012, around 38,000 tons of paddy seeds were distributed, which reached 1.3 million farmers in Eastern India [21]. Another such initiative to promote and increase SS1 s adoption amongst farmers called the 'Stress Tolerant Rice for Africa and South Asia' (STRASA) was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [21]. These initiatives are slowly bringing in changes and an increasing demand and adoption for the same can be seen in the future.

However, as estimated in this study, the production and dissemination of approximately 90,000 tons of SS1 seeds is still a major concern. In India, the production of seeds has a well-established channel for production [32]. The production is done on the basis of indents from either the private or public sector organizations placed with state or central government institutions such as the Department of Agriculture Cooperation (DoAC), Government of India or State Agriculture University/ National Seed Producers, who consolidate the indents and forwards them to Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) [33]. These seeds are then supplied to indenting organizations on the basis of allocation by DoAC for multiplication of seeds which are later made available to the farmers. This entire process takes at least 3 years, which implies that the public sector seed companies/state governments should have a pre-determined requirement of seeds at least 3 years in advance [34]. Assessing the requirement of seeds in case of contingency can provide a way to pre-plan and procure large quantities of seeds. Amongst other ways of making these SS1seeds available at appropriate times and affordable prices is by deploying a suitable model, such as a participatory seed production method involving both farmers and local stakeholders in the process; enabling partnership with private sector; seed village scheme; and creating awareness through self-help groups and community-based organizations [33–35]. This can be achieved through a continuous interaction between various institutions, policymakers and concerned stakeholders, which can further strengthen the existing local seed systems. Moreover, these interactions will enhance seed productivity and availability, thereby enabling the distribution of flood-tolerant seeds to farmers in distress across the regions [33].

Apart from these structural problems in procurement, distribution and dissemination of the seeds, there is little understanding of how the socio-economic characteristics of the farmers play a role in the adoption of this technology. For instance, in the field experiment conducted in Orissa to understand the yield variability of SS1, the authors point that caste, a marker of social status, in India-played an important role in the adoption of stress-tolerant seeds [21]. Firstly, the study found that the plots cultivated by farmers belonging to marginalized caste groups were already exposed to more flooding. Despite being more vulnerable to flooding, the study found a lower adoption rate of the SS1 seeds amongst them, which was attributed to the high incidence of poverty amongst the lower-caste groups. Thus, there are substantial social barriers in effective adoption of new technology such as SS1 amongst farmers. This will require designing policies that can make stress-tolerant seeds affordable for poor farmers through subsidies or other benefits.
