It is estimated that about one fourth of India's population of 1.2 billion suffer from chronic undernutrition, despite widespread efforts to reduce their plight. As most of these people are in rural areas involved in farming for their livelihoods, agriculture occupies a central place for bringing about any significant change in this regard.  
 
Agriculture is highly knowledge-intensive requiring a great deal of information from both established systems and traditional practices. Coupled with the rapid changes happening around –WTO/globalization, the frenetic pace of urbanization, impact of  climate change, burgeoning consumer segment – to name a few – the current state of agriculture with its lackadaisical growth and continued farm crisis, makes poverty eradication complex and daunting. The basic premise of the Food and Nutrition Security Community (FNS) thus stems from these myriad developmental challenges with the focused objective of making development more effective.   
 
Knowledge management i.e. generation, dissemination and application of knowledge - particularly in a country of India's size and diversity - becomes highly critical and strategically important. Acquisition and possession of knowledge give the person greater confidence, competence and insight.  With shared knowledge and understanding, problems get deconstructed leading to durable and long-lasting developmental outcomes. 
 
Over the last nearly three years' of its existence, the FNS community has built up a valuable repository of shared knowledge covering a wide range of issues critical to food and nutrition. Being cross-disciplinary, the topics elicit active participation not only from members of this community, but also from other Solution Exchange communities elevating the level of discourse.
 
Several of these queries stem from government programs, from various NGOs, civil society groups, national academic research institutions and bi-lateral organizations.  Many are also from international institutions like FAO, IFAD, ADB, ICRISAT, UNDP, IFPRI, World Bank and UNICEF. Apart from significant policy impacts such as the discussions on the draft National Farmers' Policy, NAIP project, NREGA, SARD, MDM, ICDS, Right to Food, and gender in agriculture, some of these exercises also transformed into practical action projects.
 
The FNS community invites upon all practitioners, researchers, policy makers, donors, private players, civil society and anyone engaged in such work, to join and strengthen this voluntary, impartial and free platform. It is our collective responsibility to partake in the stupendous task of bridging the knowledge gap between research priorities and grassroots problems, between potential and practice, and pave way for a focused and positive collaboration - transcending social, cultural, institutional and geographic boundaries.
 
And we do believe, with our collective endeavor we would co-create knowledge and be able to share, leverage and apply it for a common brighter future. 

Looking forward to your support and cooperation in this wonderful endeavour of knowledge sharing

Gopi N Ghosh & T N Anuradha
Resource Team - FNS Community