Leveraging Partnerships for Developing Climate Hardy Crops.

Significant information and knowledge is being generated for commercial crops.  However, this is somewhat restricted to crops where there is commercial interest and market opportunity for bringing value added crops.  Public -private partnership offers an opportunity to take this knowledge from the private sector on certain traits, quality aspects, molecular tools and combine this with the knowledge which exists in the public sector on some of the crops which the private sector has traditionally not worked on.  Pigeon pea and chickpea in India offer such an example.  India needs to improve the production and productivity of these crops with or without climate change impacts.  The productivity today remains low. Public sector continues to spend resources to improve these crops while the private sector investment in these crops is low.  The key opportunity of how the public and private sector investments (not just financial) can be leveraged will be discussed.