This multi-component, impact-oriented research and development project’s goal is to improve the livelihoods of millions of poor rural households in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. This goal will be achieved through the introduction, adaptation, and promotion of improved crop production technologies—notably zero-till establishment of wheat, bed planting of wheat and rice, and surface seeding of wheat—that have a proven capacity to increase the productivity and improve the sustainability of rice-wheat cropping systems. The project will also foster more diverse agroecosystems, in order to reduce the area under (relatively unsustainable) continuous rice-wheat rotations. By the time the three-year project concludes at the end of 2006, it is anticipated that the area under these technologies will have increased from the current 370,000 ha to nearly 1.5 million ha, and the number of farmers who have adopted the technologies will have increased from the current 81,000 to around 325,000. The benefits associated with the uptake of these technologies will be broadly distributed across a large number of poor rural households. The project will be managed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and implemented in collaboration with partners in the Rice-Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (RWC).