A two-day planning meeting was held on 29-30 March 2009 at ICRISAT for the VDSA project . Samarendu Mohanty and Thelma Paris from IRRI; PK Joshi and Anjani Kumar from NCAP; Alamgir Chowdhury from Socioconsult Bangladesh; and several partners from six states of India; along with Drs MCS Bantilan, KPC Rao, VR Kiresur, P Parthasarathy Rao, NP Singh, PS Birthal and the RP–MIP team from ICRISAT participated in the meeting.

Dr KPC Rao devoted the first day to discussions on the Longitudinal Panel Survey in SAT India, along with perspective sharing on the VLS in East India and Bangladesh by PK Joshi and Samarendu Mohanty. This was followed by a lively session on the use of the qualitative component as being complementary to the quantitative element in conducting these studies. As availability of meso datasets is vital to carry out the project, a discussion was held on the availability of updated and expansion of meso level (state, district, taluka, etc) agricultural data in India and Bangladesh. The next session was devoted to discussions on meso database, particularly on increasing the availability of updated and expanded district-level agricultural data to track rural poverty.

Discussions were also held on survey methods that have been used so far in the three VDSA study regions, followed by brainstorming sessions. This helped the group zero in on the criteria on which additional districts and existing ones would be chosen for the study. To ensure parity across regions, certain areas of commonality such as normal rainfall, percentage of irrigated land, infrastructure index, incidence of poverty and value of production were considered. The sampling method was agreed upon to select single or twin villages from each district depending on the required population and identifying households that would be representative of landless, small, medium and large landholding individuals. It was decided that a training of trainers (ToT) would be organized among partners from NCAP, IRRI and ICRISAT on qualitative methods to elicit information along with discussions and finalization of survey questionnaires in the last week of April 2009.