In a gesture that is both poetic and profoundly consequential, the conference shall herald the inauguration of the M.S. Swaminathan Award for Food and Peace, instituted in collaboration with The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). The annual laurel, accompanied by a $25,000 honorarium and a commemorative medal, aims to recognize pioneering contributions to food security and climate justice across the 138 nations of the Global South—where hunger remains not merely a nutritional void but a moral affront to human dignity and equity.

India’s agricultural renaissance, however, cannot proceed on rhetoric alone—it must be powered by invention. In that spirit, MSSRF and Social Alpha shall announce the launch of a Rs 1 crore Agritech Innovation Challenge. The initiative targets frontier solutions across three critical domains: The restitution of soil vitality, gender-just mechanisation and scalable bio-waste valorisation. This clarion call to India’s innovators seeks to meld the cerebral with the practical, beckoning disruptive minds to till the furrows of change and design for both resilience and inclusion.

Sessions across the conference interrogated and operationalised the notion of “Biohappiness”—a term that reimagines agriculture not just as a means of production but as a pathway to planetary and personal wellbeing. From biofortified crops to regenerative soil management, and from ecosystem-based policies to incentivised carbon farming, the deliberations shall illustrate how environmental custodianship and economic viability are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, mutually constitutive.

Importantly, the conference embodies a mosaic of perspectives. The Youth Science Forum shall galvanise the intellectual ardour of the next generation. The Women Farmers’ Roundtable shall reclaime space for gendered agency in agri-policy. Meanwhile, the Digital Agriculture Showcase shall unveile algorithmic and AI-driven futures for farming—where satellites may scan for chlorophyll stress, mobile platforms may democratise agronomic intelligence, and data may become as critical a farm input as water or seed.

As the inaugural session draws nearer, one theme rings clear: The path to food and climate justice lies not in isolated innovation but in deeply integrated, inclusive transformation.