**3. Technological approaches towards climate resilient agriculture**

Some important practices that assist to adapt the climate changes for crop production including (i) Building resilience in soil (tillage management, avoid bare soil, fertilizer application after mandatory soil testing, increase soil carbon through organic manure, green manuring, crop rotation or intercropping with legume sequester carbon and biochar), (ii) Adapted cultivars and cropping systems (crop diversification, shallow-deep root and legume-cereal cropping system, improved early/short duration cultivars for tolerant against drought, heat and submergence capturing optimum yields despite climatic stresses), (iii) Rainwater harvesting and recycling (inter-row water harvesting, inter-plot water harvesting, in farm ponds and reservoirs and recycling), (iv) Farm machinery (chisel and para plow to opening the furrows which conserves rain water, laser leveler helps in increasing nutrient as well as water use efficiency), (v) Crop contingency plans (livestock and fishery interventions), (vi) Weather based agro advisories (automatic weather stations establishment at experimental farms and mini-weather observatories records for real time weather parameters such as rainfall, temperature and wind speed, which customized through agro advisories and improve weather literacy among the farmers).

Plant breeding procedures have been constantly evolving to meet the increasing food demand. The art of plant breeding has been practiced in various forms since the start of human civilization. In conventional plant breeding, development of a new cultivar take around 10–14 years and may even exceed this period based on the plant habit, reproductive cycle and complexity of traits involved. The rapid climate change necessitates the development of varieties in a shorter period to tackle with the unpredictable weather parameters. The concept of Smart breeding is an integration of conventional breeding strategies with advanced molecular, genomic and phenomic tools to efficiently and effectively breed the resilient crop cultivars with enhanced yield potential. New breeding approaches such as rapid generation advancement, doubled haploid (DH), marker assisted back crossing (MABC), marker assisted recurrent selection (MARS), genomic selection (GS) etc. have been used to help shorten the breeding cycle along with efficient screening for specific biotic and abiotic stresses. Biotechnology-based breeding technologies (marker-assisted breeding and genetic modifications) will be essential to assist and accelerate genetic gain, but their application requires additional investment in the understanding, genetic characterization and phenotyping for complex adaptive traits to be exploited for climate resilient breeding.
