On 17 June 2026, the village of Munimpur in Haryana’s Jhajjar district saw a crowd of over 3,500 farmers turn up for a single event: the opening of a new agricultural centre. That centre, the 35th Indo-Israel Centre of Excellence (CoE) under the Indo-Israel Agricultural Project (IIAP), was inaugurated in the presence of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, Agriculture Minister Shyam Singh Rana and Israel’s Ambassador to India, H.E. Reuven Azar.
A crowd that size for the opening of a farm facility says something. Farmers didn’t just come from the village, they came from districts all around. That kind of interest doesn’t appear overnight. It is the result of nearly two decades of work that has slowly won the trust of ordinary farmers, something most development programmes hope for but rarely get.
So while the new centre is worth talking about, the real story is how far this whole partnership has come.
India and Israel signed a bilateral agreement on agriculture back in 2006. Two years later, in 2008, the work actually got going under the Indo-Israel Agricultural Project. It began small, just one centre at Gharaunda in Karnal, focused on vegetables. Today that single centre has grown into a network of 35 centres spread across 12 states, now covering not just vegetables but also fruits, floriculture and nursery management. Very few foreign agricultural programmes in India have lasted this long, stayed this steady, or reached this deep into the field.
The newly opened centre at Munimpur was built for ₹8.50 crore. It works on seed production technology, floriculture and quality planting material. Along with it, a Horticulture Research Centre has come up at Raiya at a cost of ₹13.27 crore, set up to do research on horticultural crops and medicinal plants that suit local conditions.
The idea behind these centres is simple. Instead of keeping new methods locked inside labs or classrooms, each centre runs as a working demonstration farm. Farmers can come and actually see the technology working in their own kind of soil and weather before they decide to try it on their own land. Things like protected cultivation, drip irrigation, fertigation, high-quality seedling production and integrated pest management are all shown in practice.
The result is better productivity, better quality produce and less waste of resources.
The numbers show how much ground this covers. The 35 centres together produce more than 25 million quality vegetable seedlings and over 387,000 fruit plants every year. Around 1.2 lakh farmers get proper training each year, and more than 250 Indian agricultural officers have been sent to Israel for advanced training. The programme has also grown through the Villages of Excellence initiative, which tries to take these modern methods out of the demonstration farms and spread them across whole groups of villages.
There’s a bigger reason all this matters. Farming uses the largest share of India’s freshwater and in several states groundwater is running low. Using water more wisely isn’t just a farming issue anymore, it ties directly into the country’s food security and its ability to handle climate change in the years ahead.
This is exactly where Israel has something to offer. Because Israel has always had to farm with very little water, it ended up leading the way in irrigation efficiency, protected cultivation and precision nutrient management. The Indo-Israel partnership basically takes those lessons and fits them to Indian conditions, so farmers can grow more while using less.
A good example came up in the discussions at Munimpur: a technology called N-Drip. It’s an Israeli gravity-powered micro-irrigation system being brought in through MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation. The clever part is that it runs without pumps or any external power, which is meant to make precise irrigation easier and cheaper for small and marginal farmers who can’t manage heavy infrastructure. How well it works over time will depend on local conditions and how many farmers actually pick it up, but it shows the partnership is still moving forward and not stuck on older irrigation methods.
In the end, you can’t judge this project just by counting centres or trained farmers. Its bigger value is in what it does for farmers, helping them get better yields, grow better-quality produce, use fewer resources and reach higher-value markets. On top of that, it has quietly strengthened India’s own agricultural system through all that training, demonstration and sharing of knowledge.
The hard part now is scaling. India is a country of small, scattered landholdings and making these technologies work economically for everyone is not easy. Showing farmers what’s possible is a good first step, but real success only comes when large numbers actually adopt these methods.
Still, it’s hard to argue with the progress. From one centre in Haryana to 35 across the country, the Indo-Israel Agricultural Project has grown from a diplomatic handshake into one of India’s most lasting examples of agricultural technology transfer. And as India tries to do two difficult things at once, raise farmers’ incomes while using water and other resources more carefully, the 35th centre matters not so much for the building itself, but for the model it stands for: steady cooperation, practical ideas and technology transfer that actually reaches the ground.