Chapter 14: Agriculture
Between Kolkata and Amritsar, a train crosses more than 1,500 kilometres of farmland, and somewhere in the middle it crosses a line that no map prints.
In the east the fields are flooded. Rice stands in ankle-deep water, transplanted by hand, fed by more than 150 cm of monsoon rain a year. Water sits in every low corner of the land, and the air is heavy with it.
Travel west and the water thins. Bengal gives way to Bihar, then to the wide plains of Uttar Pradesh, and the paddy shrinks with every hundred kilometres. By the time the train reaches Punjab and Haryana, the standing water is gone. Here the winter fields are golden with wheat — a crop that asks for only 50 to 75 cm of rain and rots if the ground is kept too wet.
Somewhere near the 100 cm rainfall line, rice country quietly becomes wheat country. No fence marks it. No official drew it. The rain drew it, and the farmers, reading the sky season after season, followed.
That invisible line is this whole chapter in miniature. A crop is not grown where a farmer simply prefers it; it is grown where the moisture, the soil, the temperature — and now the tube-well and the fertiliser bag — let it pay. Change the water, and you change the crop. Change the crop, and you change the livelihood of millions of people.
Diagram
Fig. 14.0-1 Caption: Rainfall sets the outer limits of farming, and the 100 cm line marks where dry-country crops give way to wet-country crops. Brief: Draw a horizontal gradient bar running left (dry) to right (wet), labelled by annual rainfall bands: ‘below 30 cm (arid — no farming without irrigation)’, ‘30–75 cm (semi-arid — dry farming: millets, pulses, oilseeds)’, ‘75–100 cm (sub-humid — wheat belt)’, ‘over 100 cm (humid — rice belt)’. Mark a bold vertical line at the 100 cm boundary and label it ‘100 cm isohyet’. Keep it a schematic gradient bar, not a map of India. No arrows.
14.1 Agriculture in India
Agriculture is the oldest and still the largest way Indians earn a living. Before we study any single crop, it is worth asking what farming rests on, and why the same country grows rice in one corner and wheat in another. The answer, more than anything else, is water — and this section begins there.
14.1.1 The Place of Agriculture in the Economy
Farming does not just feed India; it shapes the whole economy around it. In recent years agriculture has produced only about a sixth of the country’s Gross Value Added — the money value of everything the economy makes — yet more than half of all working Indians still depend on it for their living.
That mismatch is the single most important fact about Indian agriculture. When a sixth of the output has to support over half of the workers, the output shared out per farm worker is small. This is why farm incomes lag behind, and why a bad season hits so many households at once.
Agriculture also feeds the factories. Many industries take their raw material straight from the field — cotton for textile mills, cane for sugar mills, oilseeds for crushing units. Such industries are called agro-based industries, and their fortunes rise and fall with the harvest.
The link runs both ways, and this is where farming reaches every family. A good harvest puts money in rural pockets and lifts demand for factory goods; a failed one drains that demand and drags industry down with it.
14.1.2 Wet and Dry Farming
The most important thing a crop needs is moisture, and in India that moisture comes almost entirely from the monsoon. When rain is the only water a crop gets, the farming is called rain-fed. Whether a farmer can rely on rain alone depends on how much falls in a year.
Where the annual rainfall is less than 75 cm, farming is called dry farming — crops must be hardy, and moisture is carefully conserved in the soil. Where more than 75 cm falls, the farming is called wet farming, and a wider range of crops becomes possible. The 75 cm line is the rough divide between the two.
But rainfall totals hide a problem. India’s rain arrives in a short, crowded monsoon spell, so even a ‘wet’ district may face long dry weeks between showers. Only Assam, parts of West Bengal and stretches of the western coast enjoy fairly short dry spells.
Because the monsoon can arrive late, leave early, or break for weeks in the middle, no region is truly safe on rain alone. This is why irrigation becomes not a luxury but a necessity for a dependable harvest.
14.1.3 Moisture Zones and Their Crops
Rainfall sorts India into moisture zones, and each zone allows a different kind of farming. The wettest support the most demanding crops; the driest support almost nothing without help.
Areas receiving 75 to 100 cm are the sub-humid zone, short of moisture for about two-thirds of the year. Areas with 30 to 75 cm form the semi-arid zone, drought-prone and short of moisture the year round — southern Haryana, eastern Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the rain-shadow east of the Western Ghats. Areas below 30 cm are arid, where no crop grows without irrigation. In the drier zones millets, pulses and oilseeds are the mainstays, and yields are low.
The rainfall map explains the opening train journey. An isohyet — a line joining places of equal rainfall — of 100 cm roughly splits the country in two. East of it, where more than 100 cm falls, rice dominates; west of it, in the drier belt, wheat takes over.
Irrigation lets a crop break the rainfall rule. Once tube-wells and canals guaranteed water, rice spread into dry Punjab and Haryana and wheat into wetter Bihar and West Bengal — living proof of what assured water can do.
Map
Map 14.1 Caption: Annual rainfall sorts India into farming zones, and the 100 cm isohyet marks the rough divide between the rice country of the east and the wheat country of the north-west. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Shade four annual-rainfall bands: below 30 cm (arid), 30–75 cm (semi-arid), 75–100 cm (sub-humid) and over 100 cm (humid). Mark the 100 cm isohyet as a bold line. Key must show the four rainfall bands and the isohyet. Do not label individual crops or states; do not show any part of India as disputed.
14.2 Crop Rotation
Grow the same crop on the same field year after year, and the soil slowly runs down. Each crop draws the same nutrients from the same depth, and the same pests return to a familiar host. Yields fall even though nothing about the weather has changed.
The old answer to this problem was not a fertiliser bag but a plan. Crop rotation is the practice of growing different crops in a fixed succession on the same field, so that what one crop takes out, the next puts back.
How Rotation Feeds The Soil
Every crop is a feeder, but not all feed alike. A cereal such as wheat or rice is a heavy user of nitrogen, the nutrient plants need to build leaf and grain. Grown again and again, it strips the soil of it.
The repair comes from legumes — the pulse family, such as gram, pea and bean, and the oilseed groundnut. Their roots carry small swellings, or nodules, that house bacteria able to take nitrogen straight from the air and lock it into the soil. This is nitrogen fixation: turning air-nitrogen, which plants cannot use, into soil-nitrogen, which they can.
So a legume grown after a cereal quietly refills the store the cereal emptied. When the field returns to cereal, it grows on soil the legume has restored — with less bought fertiliser needed.
Flowchart
Fig. 14.2-1 Caption: Rotation is a cycle in which a soil-draining crop is followed by a soil-restoring one, then the field returns to the first crop. Nodes: Grow a cereal (drains nitrogen, builds up its pests) → soil nitrogen and structure decline → grow a legume next season → root-nodule bacteria fix air-nitrogen into the soil, structure recovers, the cereal’s pests starve for want of their host → grow the cereal again on restored soil → back to the start (the cycle repeats)
Rotation does more than balance nitrogen. Crops with deep roots and shallow roots draw water and nutrients from different soil layers, so the whole soil profile is used. And a pest tied to one crop finds no host in the season the field carries another, breaking its build-up without a single spray.
The choice of what follows what depends on the field itself. A very demanding crop that exhausts the soil quickly — sugarcane or tobacco — is followed by lighter or restorative crops, and the exact sequence rests on the local soil and on the farmer’s own reading of the land.
The soybean season is not a season lost. It feeds the wheat that follows and shrinks the fertiliser bill for the whole cycle. But a farmer can only give a season to the legume if the family can afford to grow a lower-value crop for those months — which is why rotation, though wise, is not always easy.
Rotation matters for two clear reasons. First, it keeps the land in good tilth — the loose, crumbly condition that lets roots spread and water soak in — and makes fuller use of land and labour through the year. Second, in dry climates it stretches scarce irrigation water further, since restorative crops often need less of it than thirsty cereals.
14.3 Cropping Intensity
A country can grow more food in two ways: it can farm more land, or it can make the land it already farms work harder. India has almost run out of the first option — nearly all the land fit for the plough is already under it. So the second option, growing more than one crop a year on the same field, is where the extra output must now come from.
The measure of how hard the land is worked is cropping intensity — the number of crops raised on a field during one agricultural year, the farming year that runs from July to June. It is written as a percentage, and to understand the figure we first need two simpler ones.
Net Sown Area And Gross Cropped Area
The net sown area is the land actually sown at least once in the year, counted once no matter how many crops it carries. The gross cropped area is the net sown area plus the area sown more than once — every field is counted again for each extra crop it grows. A field that grows two crops is counted once in the net area but twice in the gross area.
Cropping intensity is the gross cropped area written as a percentage of the net sown area:
\[\text{Cropping intensity} = \frac{\text{Gross cropped area}}{\text{Net sown area}} \times 100 \quad (\text{per cent})\]
If every field grew exactly one crop, the two areas would be equal and the intensity would be 100 per cent. Every point above 100 tells us that some land grew a second or third crop.
That 141.6 per cent means that for every 100 hectares India sowed, it actually harvested about 142 hectares of crops. A good part of the land was cropped more than once — but on average each field still fell well short of two full crops a year. And this single national figure hides enormous differences between one state and the next.
The pattern behind these numbers is geographical. Intensity is high on the well-watered, densely settled northern plains, on coastal plains and in the river deltas, where irrigation or heavy rainfall lets a second crop follow the first. It is low in the arid and semi-arid lands and the hilly north-east, where light or heavy soils and a shortage of water leave the field idle for much of the year.
What Drives Intensity Up
The single biggest driver is assured water. Once irrigation guarantees moisture, a farmer can sow a second crop the moment the first is off, so less land lies fallow. Quick-ripening, early-maturing seeds shorten each crop’s stay in the ground, freeing the field sooner. Fertilisers, machines to clear and replant quickly, and pesticides to protect the extra crop all help push the count above one.
So cropping intensity is really a measure of how efficiently land is used, and water is the master key that unlocks it.
14.4 Problems of Indian Agriculture
Indian agriculture feeds a fifth of humanity, yet it is weighed down by problems that keep its yields among the lowest in the world. Some of these problems come from nature — an unreliable monsoon, thin or eroding soils. Others are made by people — the way land is divided, the way the harvest is sold, the way farmers borrow. This section looks at the man-made ones most of all, because those are the ones policy can change.
The Land Itself: Small And Fragmented Holdings
The first problem is the shape of the farm. Over generations, land is divided among heirs until a single family owns not one field but several tiny, scattered strips. This scattering is called fragmentation, and it wastes land and labour: strips are separated by boundaries that grow nothing, and a farmer loses hours walking between plots too small to use a machine on.
Many holdings have shrunk so far that they are uneconomic — too small to support a family or to repay any investment. The remedy is consolidation of holdings, in which a farmer’s scattered strips are exchanged and pooled into one workable block. Where consolidation has been done, machines and irrigation suddenly become worthwhile.
Dependence On An Uncertain Monsoon
As the chapter’s opening showed, most Indian fields drink from the monsoon, and only about half the cropped area is irrigated. A late arrival, an early withdrawal, or a long break in the rains can wipe out a sowing. This is not a failure of the farmer; it is a gamble forced on anyone who must wait on the sky.
Degraded And Eroding Soils
Soils that have grown crops for thousands of years without being properly fed lose their fertility. Wind and running water carry off the fine topsoil from bare or sloping land, and once it is gone it takes centuries to rebuild. Tree planting, contour ploughing along the slope, and building low earth banks called bunds all slow the loss.
Ironically, the cure for one problem can create another. Where canals pour on more water than the land can drain, the water table rises, water stands, and salts are drawn up to the surface — turning fertile fields white and useless.
Selling The Harvest: The Grip Of The Middleman
Growing the crop is only half the battle; getting a fair price for it is the other half. A small farmer, in debt and without storage, often cannot wait for a good price. He is forced into a distress sale — selling at once, at whatever the local trader or moneylender offers, simply to meet his debts. Surveys have long found that a large slice of the final price the consumer pays — sometimes around half — is taken by the chain of middlemen, not by the farmer who grew the crop.
The government’s answer is the regulated market, an official marketplace with standard weights, open competitive bidding, and machinery to settle disputes, so that the producer is less easily cheated.
Storing And Moving The Harvest
Much of what is grown is lost before it is eaten, a large part of it to poor storage. Scientific storage is the cure, and agencies such as the Food Corporation of India and the Central Warehousing Corporation build up a buffer stock — a reserve of grain held for lean times and to steady prices.
Moving the harvest is just as hard. Lakhs of villages are still linked to the market only by kutcha roads — unmetalled, earthen tracks that turn to mud and become useless in the rains. Unable to reach the main market, the farmer must again sell cheap, close to home.
The Shortage Of Capital
Farming needs money — for seed, fertiliser and machines — but a farmer’s own capital is locked up in his land and standing crop. So he borrows. For long, that borrowing meant the moneylender: the All India Rural Credit Survey found moneylenders supplied 68.6 per cent of rural credit in 1950-51. Their share fell to about 43 per cent by 1975-76, as institutional credit — cooperative banks and commercial banks lending at fair terms — took over much of the field.
Behind several of these problems lies one shared answer: better seeds, more fertiliser, assured water and machines. Those modern inputs, and the revolution they set off, are the subject of the next section.
14.5 Modern Inputs and the Use of Technology
For most of its history Indian farming ran on the same tools its ancestors used: a wooden plough, a pair of bullocks, saved seed and the hope of rain. That began to change in the 1960s, when four modern inputs arrived together — better seed, more fertiliser, assured water and machines. Because none of them works well without water, irrigation became the thread that ties the whole package together.
14.5.1 High-Yielding Varieties of Seeds
The seed is the starting point of every crop, and the old seeds set a low ceiling on yield. The breakthrough came with the high-yielding variety (HYV) — a crop bred to give far more grain from the same field. HYV wheat was brought to India from Mexico and HYV rice from the Philippines, and improved varieties of jowar and maize followed.
Why does an HYV yield more? The key was the dwarf plant. Older tall varieties, fed with fertiliser, grew leggy and fell over, or ‘lodged’, spoiling the crop. The new dwarf plants are short and stiff: they put their energy into grain rather than stalk, and stand upright under heavy fertiliser and water. Give them those inputs, and they reward the farmer many times over.
The government backed the change by producing and certifying good seed — through the National Seeds Corporation, set up in 1963, and later the state seed corporations — and the National Seed Policy of 2001 set the framework for the whole seed sector. Yet quality seed remains costly, and often out of reach of the smallest farmers.
14.5.2 Fertilisers, Manures and Biocides
Land that has grown crops for thousands of years, with little put back, loses its fertility, and Indian yields have long paid the price. Manures and fertilisers do for the soil what good food does for the body — replace what has been used up. A large part of the growth in India’s farm output is credited to rising fertiliser use.
Organic manure — above all cow dung — is the healthiest food for the soil, but much of it is burnt as fuel in the shape of dung cakes rather than returned to the field, and this potential goes largely unused. So the load has fallen on chemical fertiliser, whose use has climbed steeply.
Graph
Fig. 14.5-1 Caption: India’s use of chemical fertiliser more than doubled between 1990-91 and 2020-21. Brief: Line graph. X-axis: years (1990-91, 1995-96, 2005-06, 2010-11, 2015-16, 2020-21). Y-axis: total nutrient (N + P + K) consumption in lakh tonnes. Plot the single series: 125.46, 138.77, 203.41, 281.22, 267.53, 325.36. Source: Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2022. Show the small dip around 2015-16.
Crops also lose heavily to pests, weeds and disease, and to fight them farmers use biocides — the family of pesticides, herbicides and weedicides. These have saved much of the harvest that was once lost. But sprayed carelessly and in excess, they poison water, soil and wildlife, so the same chemicals that save a crop can damage the land around it.
14.5.3 Irrigation
In a country where the rain is a gamble, irrigation is the most important input of all. India is the second most irrigated country in the world after China, yet only about half its cropped area is watered — the rest still waits on the monsoon.
The reach of irrigation has grown enormously, from about 22.6 million hectares of potential in 1950-51 to over 100 million hectares by 2007. The country’s Ultimate Irrigation Potential — the largest area that could ever be irrigated with all sources fully developed — is assessed at about 139.89 million hectares, of which well over half has been harnessed. Water reaches the field from canals, from wells and tube-wells, and from tanks.
How the water is applied matters as much as how much. Flooding a field from a canal is simple but wasteful, and much of the water is lost. Micro-irrigation — sprinkler systems that spray from above and drip systems that release water drop by drop at each plant’s roots — delivers far less waste, though it still covers only a small share of India’s irrigated land.
Diagram
Fig. 14.5-2 Caption: The three ways of watering a field waste very different amounts of water. Brief: Three side-by-side panels of a cross-section of soil with a row of crop plants. Panel 1 ‘Flood / canal irrigation’: a sheet of water spread across the whole surface, much of it shown soaking away and evaporating. Panel 2 ‘Sprinkler’: overhead spray falling on the crop. Panel 3 ‘Drip’: a pipe releasing single drops at the base of each plant, water going straight to the roots. Label each panel. Arrows show water moving downward onto and into the soil; emphasise least loss in the drip panel.
Applied carelessly, though, irrigation carries its own danger. Where more water is poured on than the land can drain, the ground waterlogs and turns saline — the process traced in the previous section — so assured water must be matched by good drainage.
14.5.4 Farm Mechanisation
The fourth input is the machine. Farm mechanisation means replacing human and animal muscle with tractors, power tillers, pump sets and threshers for ploughing, sowing, watering, harvesting and transport.
India was slow to mechanise, and for good reasons. Heavy pressure of population on the land, tiny and fragmented holdings, the poverty of farmers, cheap and plentiful labour, and the high cost of diesel and machines all held it back.
Yet the change has come. The number of tractors rose from a mere 0.2 per 100 hectares in 1961 to almost 6 per 100 hectares by 1988, and the share of animal power in farm work fell from about 93 per cent in 1960-61 to roughly 10 per cent by 2014-15. Machine power now dominates on the well-irrigated north-western plains, and is spreading elsewhere as holdings are consolidated and water is assured.
Seen together, these four inputs are not four separate improvements but one linked package — and the story of how that package transformed Indian farming is the story of the Green Revolution.
14.6 From Subsistence to Commercial Agriculture
The modern inputs of the last section did more than raise yields. They changed the very purpose of farming — from growing food to stay alive to growing crops to sell. This shift, from subsistence to commercial farming, is one of the deepest changes in India’s countryside since Independence.
Farming Only To Eat: Subsistence Agriculture
Subsistence agriculture is farming carried on mainly to feed the farmer’s own family, with little or nothing left over to sell. The part of the harvest that remains after the household’s own needs are met, and can be taken to market, is the marketable surplus — and in subsistence farming that surplus is tiny or absent.
Before Independence, most Indian farming was of this kind, not from any failing of the farmer but from a shortage of means. Holdings were small and scattered; the work was done by the family and its bullocks; seed was saved from the last crop; and there was no assured water, little fertiliser and no capital to buy either. With such thin inputs, productivity per hectare and per worker stayed low, and there was simply no surplus left to sell or to reinvest.
The Turn To The Market: Commercial Agriculture
Commercial agriculture is farming carried on to produce a surplus for sale in the market. The change from one to the other did not happen by itself; it needed the whole package of the previous section, plus two things more.
The first was consolidation, which pooled a farmer’s scattered strips into a single block large enough to justify a machine and a tube-well. The second was institutional credit, which put cash in the farmer’s hands to buy seed, fertiliser and diesel. With consolidated land, assured water, high-yielding seed and fertiliser, yields rose above what the family could eat — and for the first time there was a surplus to sell.
Flowchart
Fig. 14.6-1 Caption: The turn from subsistence to commercial farming is a chain, each link making the next one possible. Nodes: Subsistence farm (small scattered plots, family and bullock labour, saved seed, output barely feeds the household) → consolidation pools the plots, and HYV seed, fertiliser, assured irrigation and machines are applied, paid for with institutional credit → yield rises above the family’s own needs → a marketable surplus appears → the farmer sells it for cash in the market → commercial agriculture, the cash reinvested in the next crop
A Change Still In Progress
The change is real but uneven. On large, consolidated, well-irrigated farms it is nearly complete; there, the farmer sells most of what he grows and buys much of what he needs. On the many small and rain-fed holdings that never got the inputs, farming is still close to subsistence.
And going commercial is not the same as growing rich. A farmer who now depends on selling his crop is also exposed to the price it fetches — and, as the earlier section showed, that price is often set by traders and middlemen, not by the grower.
14.7 The Green Revolution
The four modern inputs did not arrive quietly. Put together and pushed hard from the mid-1960s, they set off the sharpest change Indian farming has ever seen — a change that turned a hungry, food-importing country into one that fed itself. This is the Green Revolution, and it deserves to be understood both for what it achieved and for whom it left behind.
14.7.1 Origin and Meaning
The Green Revolution is the name given to the steep rise in food-grain output from the mid-1960s, achieved by combining high-yielding seeds with fertiliser, assured irrigation and machines. It was, above all, an answer to a crisis.
In the mid-1960s two failed monsoons brought drought and near-famine, and India survived only by importing food. To escape that dependence, dwarf high-yielding wheat — bred by the scientist Norman Borlaug in Mexico — was brought in, and the High-Yielding Varieties Programme was launched in 1966. The results were dramatic: food-grain production in 1967-68 was about 25 per cent higher than the year before, a leap larger than the gains of the previous sixteen years put together.
The change was so sudden that it needed a name, and in 1968 the American official William S. Gaud called it the ‘Green Revolution’. Its foundations were not the seed alone but a whole package: high-yielding seeds, fertilisers, irrigation, machines and pesticides, resting on consolidated holdings, farm credit, rural roads and electricity, and government purchase of the grain.
14.7.2 Impact of the Green Revolution
The first and clearest impact was on production. Food-grain output rose steeply, and one crop gained far more than the rest — wheat, whose output has multiplied about five times since 1967-68, against roughly two and a half times for food-grains as a whole. For this reason the Indian Green Revolution is often called a Wheat Revolution.
Graph
Fig. 14.7-1 Caption: Wheat production climbed from a few million tonnes at Independence to over a hundred million tonnes today. Brief: Bar graph. X-axis: three years — 1950-51, 1970-71, 2023-24. Y-axis: wheat production in million tonnes. Bars: 6.46, 23.8, 112.9. Source: Economic Survey (2023-24) and Agricultural Statistics at a Glance. Label each bar with its value.
That surge freed India from food imports. The country became self-sufficient in food-grains, built up a buffer stock for lean years, and could at times even export. Rising output also lifted the incomes of farmers who could use the new package, and it fed a wave of capitalistic farming, in which better-off farmers ploughed money into seed, fertiliser and machinery to earn still more.
The effects spread beyond the field. Demand for tractors, pumps, fertiliser and pesticides fired up the industries that make them, and the extra produce fed agro-based industries. Fears that machines would throw farm workers out of work were partly offset, because growing two or three crops a year on the same land created new demand for labour at each sowing and harvest.
14.7.3 Problems of the Green Revolution
The Green Revolution saved India from hunger, but it was neither fair to every crop, nor to every region, nor to every farmer. Its gains fell unevenly, and that unevenness became a set of problems in its own right.
The first was an imbalance between crops. Wheat and, later, rice raced ahead, while pulses, oilseeds, coarse cereals and the commercial crops — cotton, jute, tea, sugarcane — were barely touched, because good high-yielding seeds for them were slow to come. The growth of pulses, which feed the poor with protein, actually slowed.
The second was regional. The revolution reached only about two-fifths of the cropped area — the well-irrigated north-west and pockets of the south — while the eastern states and the dry lands of the west and centre were largely passed over. The gap between the favoured regions and the rest widened.
The third, and sharpest, was between farmers. The package rewarded those who could afford it — the large farmers with land and money — while small and marginal farmers, unable to buy seed, fertiliser and water, gained little. Economists studying the change found many small farmers still living below the poverty line. In short, the revolution often made the well-off richer and left the poor further behind.
There was an environmental cost too. Heavy irrigation waterlogged and salted good land; tube-wells pumped water tables down; and the steady use of fertiliser and pesticide left soils tired and water polluted. The revolution’s own methods began to threaten the resource base it depended on.
14.7.4 The Second Green Revolution
Because the first revolution reached only some crops, some regions and some farmers — and strained the land while doing so — a Second Green Revolution is now called for. It means sustainable agriculture: raising output while protecting the soil, water and biodiversity that farming depends on, rather than using them up.
The need is pressing. The population keeps rising, but the productivity of the main crops is levelling off, and the next gains must come from raising the yield of the neglected crops — sorghum, millet, pulses — and from reaching the dryland and small farmers the first revolution missed.
Its strategies share one aim: to grow more with less harm. Micro-irrigation stretches scarce water further. Organic farming replaces synthetic chemicals with integrated pest and nutrient management, protecting soil and water. Precision farming uses information technology to map how soil and crops vary across a field, so that seed, water and fertiliser are applied exactly where each is needed, cutting both cost and waste. Related approaches — green agriculture, eco-agriculture and others — all try to knit higher yields together with the care of nature.
The lesson of the second revolution is the lesson of this whole chapter: farming lives on land and water, and an agriculture that spends them faster than it renews them cannot last.
14.8 Diversifying Indian Agriculture
The Green Revolution taught India to grow grain in plenty. But a farm economy that leans on a few food crops is a fragile one — for the soil, for the market and for the farmer. The next step, already under way, is to spread farming across many more products, and this section looks at that spreading and at the animals that are so large a part of it.
14.8.1 The Case for Diversification
For most of India’s history the whole weight of farming fell on food crops, because the first task was to feed a growing population. Now agriculture is being asked to do more, and diversification — widening the range of what a farm produces — is the way it answers.
Diversification takes farming beyond food grains into fibre crops such as cotton and jute, beverage crops such as tea and coffee, cash crops such as sugarcane, and the fruits, vegetables and spices of horticulture. It also means giving proper place to animal husbandry, dairying, poultry and fishing alongside the crop.
The gains are several. A farm that grows many things is less ruined by the failure of any one; different crops and animals use land, labour and water at different times of the year; and a wider basket meets the varied demands of a richer, more urban market. The crops in the sections that follow are the produce of this diversification; the animals are its other half.
14.8.2 Animal Husbandry
Animal husbandry is the breeding, rearing and care of domestic animals — for milk, meat, hides, wool, and the muscle power that still pulls many a plough and cart. In India it is woven into farming rather than kept apart from it.
Its importance lies above all in the incomes it supports. For the landless and for small and marginal farmers, a few animals are a second source of earning that a tiny plot could never give. In semi-urban areas animal keeping is a useful sideline, and in hilly, tribal and drought-prone areas — where a crop may fail outright — livestock can be what keeps a family fed.
India carries the largest livestock population in the world, including well over half the world’s buffaloes. Its herds and flocks include cattle, both milch and draught breeds, along with buffaloes, sheep, goats, pigs and a vast and fast-growing poultry stock. In much of the country the killing of animals is avoided on religious grounds, so their numbers have grown large over time.
The table tells a story of changing use. Cattle and buffaloes rose because they yield milk; goats and sheep rose for meat, hides and wool; horses and ponies dwindled as vehicles replaced them; and poultry soared, because it is cheap and quick to raise and needs little land. Dairying and poultry are today the liveliest parts of the sector.
14.9 Crop Seasons
India does not have one growing season but three, and they are set by two things the earlier sections have already met: the timing of the monsoon and the swing of temperature through the year. A crop is grown in the season whose warmth and water suit it, so knowing the seasons is the first step to knowing why each crop is grown when it is. The three seasons, in order, are kharif, rabi and zaid.
Kharif: The Monsoon Crop
The kharif season begins with the onset of the monsoon, around June and July, and ends as winter sets in, around September and October. Its crops are sown into the rains and harvested after them, so they must love both warmth and water.
The great kharif crops are rice, maize, jowar and bajra, along with cotton, sesamum, groundnut and pulses such as moong and urad. This is the season that feeds most of the country, because it rides the monsoon that most of India depends on.
Rabi: The Winter Crop
The rabi season begins with the winter, around October and November, and ends as the heat returns in spring. Its crops grow through the cool, dry months and ripen as it warms — which is exactly what wheat and barley need: a cold spell to grow and a warm one to fill the grain.
The main rabi crops are wheat, barley, jowar (which also grows in this season), gram and oilseeds such as linseed, rape and mustard. Because rabi crops grow in the rainless winter, they lean heavily on irrigation or on moisture left in the soil by the monsoon.
Zaid: The Summer Crop
The zaid season is the short, hot stretch between the rabi harvest and the next monsoon, roughly from March or April to June. It is a season for quick-growing, thirsty crops raised entirely with irrigation.
Zaid crops include rice, maize and groundnut, and above all the summer fruits and vegetables — watermelon, muskmelon and cucumber — that thrive in heat. Some pulses have now been bred to grow in this season too, letting a farmer squeeze an extra crop from land that once lay idle.
Diagram
Fig. 14.9-1 Caption: The farming year runs through three overlapping seasons, each timed to the monsoon and the temperature. Brief: Horizontal calendar bar showing twelve months, June across to May. Three labelled season bands: ‘Kharif’ sown June–July and harvested September–October; ‘Rabi’ sown October–November and harvested March–April; ‘Zaid’ sown March–April and harvested June. Mark the onset of the monsoon in June and its withdrawal in September–October. Within each band, an arrow runs left to right from sowing to harvest (arrow direction = passage of time). Name the leading crops of each season beneath its band.
14.10 Food Crops
Food crops are the ones that feed people directly — rice, wheat, the coarse grains (jowar, bajra and ragi) and the pulses. Each is grown where its own demands for warmth, water and soil are met, so the map of India’s food crops is really a map of India’s climate and soil. This section takes them one by one, and for each asks the same two questions: what does it need, and where does it grow?
14.10.1 Rice
Rice feeds more than half of all Indians and grows on the largest area of any single crop. It is a tropical plant that demands both high heat and high humidity — it grows best where the mean monthly temperature is around 24 °C and the annual rainfall is about 150 cm. Where less than 100 cm falls, it can still be grown, but only as an irrigated crop.
Rice needs standing water and plenty of hands. Deep, fertile clayey or loamy soils suit it best, so it is the ruling crop of the flood-plains and river deltas, and transplanting it by hand calls for abundant labour. It is chiefly a kharif crop.
India is the second-largest rice producer in the world after China, growing about 22 per cent of the global crop. Its yield per hectare, though, remains far below that of the leading rice countries — a reminder that a large harvest can still hide a modest performance on each hectare.
Map
Map 14.2 Caption: Rice country follows the well-watered east, the coastal plains and the river deltas. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Shade two categories: major rice-producing areas and minor rice-producing areas, with the major areas concentrated in the eastern and north-eastern plains, the deltas of the east coast, the Indo-Gangetic plain and the coastal strips. Key must show the two categories. Do not show any part of India as disputed.
The eastern region — with its heavy rainfall, fertile deltas and large workforce — grows the bulk of India’s rice. In the north-west, irrigation lets rice spread into naturally drier Punjab and Haryana. The leading producers are shown in Table 14.3.
14.10.2 Wheat
Wheat is India’s second food crop and the staple of the north-west. It is a rabi crop, sown after the monsoon withdraws in late October or November. It needs about 10 °C at sowing and 15–20 °C as it ripens, with an average annual rainfall of 50–70 cm; the 100 cm rainfall line marks the wet edge beyond which wheat gives way to rice.
Wheat asks for well-drained loam or clay loam and cool, dry ripening weather. With irrigation it can be grown in areas of very low rainfall, and because it is heavily mechanised it needs little hand labour. India is the second-largest wheat producer in the world after China, growing about 12 per cent of the global crop.
Wheat covers over a fifth of India’s net sown area. About three-fourths of the harvest comes from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, with Rajasthan, Bihar and Gujarat adding more. Uttar Pradesh is the largest producer.
Map
Map 14.3 Caption: The wheat belt runs across the cool, irrigated plains of the north and centre. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Shade two categories: major wheat-producing areas and minor wheat-producing areas, with the major areas concentrated in the north-western plains and the northern Deccan and central plateau margins. Key must show the two categories. Do not show any part of India as disputed.
14.10.3 Jowar
Jowar, or sorghum, is the third food grain and a mainstay of the dry Deccan. It grows as both a kharif and a rabi crop, needing 25–30 °C and only about 55 cm of rainfall — a classic dry-farming crop, grown with or without irrigation. It tolerates many soils, but the black clayey loams of the peninsular plateau suit it best.
About three-quarters of India’s jowar comes from the plateau region of south India. Maharashtra alone grows roughly half the national crop, followed by Karnataka and Rajasthan, with Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and others adding the rest. Jowar feeds people in the drier tracts and serves widely as fodder.
14.10.4 Bajra
Bajra, or pearl millet, is the hardiest of the food grains, feeding poor households and their animals alike. It needs 25–30 °C and only 40–50 cm of rainfall, and it thrives where little else will — on poor, light, sandy soil. This toughness makes it the crop of the semi-arid margins.
Rajasthan is by far the largest producer, growing about two-fifths of India’s bajra, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Gujarat, with Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra adding more. It is chiefly a kharif crop of the dry north-west.
14.10.5 Ragi
Ragi, or finger millet, is grown in the drier parts of the south, with small amounts in the north. It needs 20–30 °C and 50–100 cm of rainfall, and grows on red, light black and sandy loams as well as well-drained alluvial loam. It is a rain-fed kharif crop, sown between May and August and harvested between September and January.
Karnataka is overwhelmingly the leading producer, growing well over two-thirds of India’s ragi, with Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh following. Rich in minerals, ragi has long been a valued food of the southern uplands.
14.10.6 Pulses
Pulses — gram, arhar, moong, urad, masur and the rest — are the main source of protein in a largely vegetarian diet. Yet their output has not kept pace with cereals, and their share of the cropped area has fallen. About nine-tenths of the pulse crop is rain-fed, grown on poorer land with little irrigation.
Pulses are grown across Madhya Pradesh — the largest producer — Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and several other states. They fit both seasons: arhar (tur), moong, urad and moth are kharif pulses, while gram, peas, masur and urad are grown in the rabi season. To lift a lagging crop, the National Pulses Development Programme was launched in 1986-87.
14.11 Commercial and Industrial Crops
Not every crop is grown to be eaten. Commercial crops are grown for sale, and industrial crops supply raw material to factories. Tea and coffee fill a cup, cotton and jute feed a mill, sugarcane sweetens and groundnut yields oil. As with the food crops, each is planted where its own demands are met — and each carries its own answer to the question, why here?
14.11.1 Tea
Tea is the leading beverage crop, valued for the theine that gives it its lift. It needs warmth of 25–30 °C and heavy, well-distributed rainfall of 200–250 cm. It grows on deep, friable, well-drained loam rich in organic matter — and because standing water rots its roots, it is grown on hill slopes where water runs off. Plucking the tender leaf calls for a great deal of cheap hand labour.
India is one of the world’s largest tea producers, second only to China. Assam is by far the biggest producer, its gardens spread through the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, and it contributes over half the national crop. Northern West Bengal — Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and the terai — grows about a quarter, Darjeeling tea being prized for its flavour. In the south, the Nilgiri and Anaimalai hills of Tamil Nadu and the highlands of Kerala and Karnataka form a second tea belt.
Map
Map 14.4 Caption: Tea holds the north-eastern and southern hills; coffee keeps to the Western Ghats of the south. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Mark two categories with distinct shading: tea-growing areas (concentrated in Assam and the north-east, northern West Bengal, and the Nilgiri–Anaimalai hills of the south) and coffee-growing areas (concentrated in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu). Key must show the two crops. Do not show any part of India as disputed.
14.11.2 Coffee
Coffee is the second beverage crop, and most of India’s crop is of the arabica type. It wants a hot, humid climate of 15–30 °C and 150–200 cm of rainfall, but it cannot bear frost and needs shade in strong heat. Its ideal home is the hill slopes of the Western Ghats, between about 800 and 1,600 metres, on rich, well-drained forest loam.
Karnataka is the overwhelming leader, growing well over half of India’s coffee in districts such as Chikmagalur, Kodagu and Hassan. Kerala grows about a fifth, and the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu add more. Coffee, in short, is a crop of the wet southern hills.
14.11.3 Cotton
Cotton is the raw material of the textile mill, and about half the world’s cloth is made from it. It is a tropical plant needing 20–30 °C and 50–100 cm of rainfall, with about 200 frost-free days, since frost destroys it. Its favourite soils are the black cotton soil, or regur (the moisture-holding black soil of the Deccan lava country), and the alluvium of the northern plain. Picking the bolls demands much hand labour.
India is one of the world’s largest cotton producers. Gujarat leads, followed by Maharashtra, Telangana, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, with Madhya Pradesh and Haryana adding more. Hybrid seed has raised both output and the share of long-staple, better-quality cotton.
14.11.4 Jute
Jute is the second fibre crop after cotton, giving the cheap, strong fibre from which sacking and bags are made. It needs a hot, humid climate of 24–35 °C, more than 150 cm of rainfall and very high humidity. It grows best on well-drained alluvial loam that is renewed each year by floods.
About four-fifths of India’s jute comes from West Bengal alone, with Bihar and Assam adding roughly a tenth and a twelfth, and Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tripura and Meghalaya growing the rest.
14.11.5 Sugarcane
India is often called the home of sugarcane, the main source of sugar, gur (jaggery) and khandsari (unrefined sugar). It is a long-duration crop, taking 10 to 12 months to mature. It needs a hot, humid climate of 20–30 °C and 100–150 cm of rainfall, with dry weather at harvest; frost harms it, and where rainfall is low it is irrigated. It grows on the loams of the Great Plains and the black soil of the Deccan, and being a heavy feeder, it exhausts the soil quickly.
A common practice is ratooning — cutting the cane but leaving the root in the ground, so that a fresh crop grows from the stubble. It is cheap and quick, but the yield falls with each ratoon, so it is given up after a year or two.
Sugarcane grows in two belts. The tropical belt of the south — Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra — gives high yields. The sub-tropical belt of the north — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and Punjab — carries the greatest area, and Uttar Pradesh is the largest producer.
14.11.6 Groundnut
Groundnut is India’s most important oilseed, making up about half of the major oilseeds grown. Its kernels are rich in protein and oil, used as edible oil, as vanaspati (hydrogenated cooking fat), and as cattle feed in the form of oil cake. Being a legume, it also fixes nitrogen and serves as a useful rotation crop.
It thrives in the tropical climate at 20–30 °C with 50–75 cm of rainfall, the 100 cm line marking its upper limit. It is easily hurt by frost, drought, continuous rain and standing water, and it needs a dry winter to ripen. Mostly a kharif crop, it grows on well-drained light sandy loams and red, yellow and black soils.
India is one of the world’s largest groundnut producers. Gujarat is the leading state, growing well over two-fifths of the crop, followed by Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Because it is largely rain-fed, its output swings with the monsoon from one year to the next.
14.11.7 Coconut
The coconut palm is one of the most useful of all trees. Its dried kernel, or copra, yields oil; its trunk gives timber and its husk gives coir; its water is a drink, and gur and vinegar come from its sap. It is a tropical crop needing 25–30 °C and a well-distributed rainfall of about 125–130 cm, and it will not stand frost or drought. It grows best on well-drained sandy loams along the sea-coasts and in adjoining river valleys.
India is among the world’s largest coconut producers. Tamil Nadu is the leading state, followed closely by Kerala and Karnataka, with Andhra Pradesh adding more. It is, above all, a crop of the warm, wet southern coasts.
14.12 Market Gardening and Orchard Farming
Grain fills the stomach, but a growing, better-off, city-dwelling India wants more — fruit, vegetables, flowers. Growing these for sale is the fastest-changing corner of Indian farming, and it is where the diversification of the earlier section becomes visible on the ground.
14.12.1 What Market Gardening Is
Market gardening is the intensive growing of vegetables, fruits and flowers for sale, usually in the markets of nearby towns and cities. Closely tied to it is orchard farming, the growing of fruit trees in orchards. Both belong to horticulture — the science of raising fruits, vegetables, flowers and ornamental crops.
These are grown intensively on small plots, because the produce is perishable and the returns per hectare are far higher than for grain. Several forces have pushed this corner of farming forward in recent years: rising city populations with money to spend, better transport and cold storage, drip irrigation and protected cultivation, and a government keen to diversify farming and lift rural incomes. India has become the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world, and the largest producer of several — coconut, banana, mango, ginger, turmeric and more.
14.12.2 Fruits and Orchard Farming
India grows an enormous range of fruit, and leads the world in several. Mango is the most important, and India grows about half the world’s crop; banana comes next, and citrus fruits — orange, lime, lemon — third. Apple, pear, peach, plum and walnut are the temperate fruits of the northern hills, while aonla, ber and pomegranate are the hardy fruits of the arid zones.
The pattern follows the climate. The Himalayan hill states — Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim — with their cool, temperate air, are the home of apples and other temperate fruits, Kashmir being famous for them. The warm peninsula and coasts grow the tropical fruits. In recent years, hi-tech methods — drip irrigation, protected cultivation and better post-harvest handling — have turned fruit-growing from a village sideline into a commercial venture.
14.12.3 Vegetables, Spices and Flowers
Vegetables come next to grain and milk in importance, and India is a major producer. Potato is the leading vegetable, followed by onion and tomato, with brinjal, cabbage and cauliflower close behind — India grows more cauliflower than any other country and stands second in onion. Because vegetables are the most perishable of all, they are the heart of the market-garden belts around the cities.
India is also the home of spices, and the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of them — black pepper, cardamom, ginger, turmeric and chilli, chilli topping the list. It is likewise the largest producer and exporter of cashew.
Flower-growing, or floriculture, is the newest branch to bloom. Traditional flowers such as jasmine, marigold and chrysanthemum have long been grown, but the commercial cultivation of cut flowers — rose, orchid, gladiolus — has become a real business, generating income and employment, especially for women, and has been marked out as a focus for exports.
14.13 Summary
Agriculture produces only about a sixth of India’s output but supports more than half its workers, so income per farm worker is low. It also feeds the agro-based industries, and a good or bad harvest lifts or drags the whole economy.
Moisture is the master control of Indian farming. Rain-fed farming below 75 cm of rainfall is dry farming, above it wet farming; rainfall sorts the country into arid, semi-arid and sub-humid zones; and the 100 cm isohyet roughly separates the rice country of the east from the wheat country of the north-west.
Crop rotation follows a soil-draining crop with a soil-restoring legume, whose root nodules fix nitrogen from the air. It refills nutrients, breaks pests, keeps the soil in good tilth and stretches scarce water.
Cropping intensity is the gross cropped area as a percentage of the net sown area. It measures how hard the land is worked, is driven above all by assured water, and its national figure of about 141.6 per cent (2018-19) hides wide gaps between states.
Indian agriculture is weighed down by small and fragmented holdings, dependence on an uncertain monsoon, eroding and salt-damaged soils, a marketing system that leaves the farmer at the mercy of middlemen, poor storage and transport, and a shortage of affordable credit.
Four modern inputs — high-yielding dwarf seeds, fertiliser and biocides, irrigation, and machines — together form the technology package. Dwarf HYV plants put energy into grain and stand up under heavy fertiliser and water.
With consolidation, modern inputs and institutional credit, yields rose above the family’s needs, and farming shifted from subsistence to commercial. The change is uneven and exposes the farmer to market prices he cannot control.
The Green Revolution answered the food crisis of the mid-1960s with imported HYV wheat and the whole input package. Output soared — chiefly wheat — and India fed itself, but the gains fell unevenly across crops, regions and classes, and strained soil and water. The Second Green Revolution seeks the same output by sustainable means.
Diversification spreads farming beyond food grains into fibre, beverage, cash and horticulture crops and allied activities. Animal husbandry supports the landless and small farmers, and India’s huge livestock population still yields little per animal.
India farms in three seasons — kharif with the monsoon, rabi in the cool winter, and the short summer zaid.
Each crop grows where its needs are met: rice in the hot, wet deltas and east; wheat in the cool, irrigated north-west; jowar, bajra and ragi in the dry tracts; and pulses, largely rain-fed, whose lagging output leaves India both the largest grower and a large importer.
Among the commercial crops, tea holds the well-drained hill slopes, coffee the Western Ghats, cotton the black soil of the Deccan, jute the flood-renewed delta, sugarcane both the northern and southern belts, groundnut the drier kharif tracts, and coconut the warm southern coasts.
Market gardening and orchard farming grow perishable fruits, vegetables and flowers intensively near the cities that buy them. India is now the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, and its horticulture, spices and floriculture are growing fast.
Flowchart
Fig. 14.13-1 Caption: The whole chapter as one chain — from the rain that sets the base to the crops that grow on it. Nodes: Rainfall, temperature and soil set the base → each region falls into a moisture zone that fixes dry or wet farming and which crop pays → farmers manage the land through crop rotation and by raising cropping intensity → but face problems of small holdings, monsoon risk, weak marketing and scarce credit → modern inputs (HYV seed, fertiliser, irrigation, machines) answer many of them → applied together in the Green Revolution, they multiply output but reward mainly the well-watered and well-off → farming turns from subsistence to commercial and diversifies into cash crops, horticulture and animal husbandry → yet each crop still grows only where its moisture, temperature and soil allow — the base the chapter began with
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
A national or state average hides the field. India’s cropping intensity, fertiliser use and yields all vary enormously below the headline figure, and the average is never the individual farm.
A production total is not a yield. A state can lead in output through sheer area while each of its hectares performs modestly, and being the largest producer says nothing about whether the farmer who grew the crop is prosperous.
A single year’s figures smooth over the monsoon’s swings. In a country where most farming still waits on the rain, one good or bad season can move the numbers far more than any lasting change.
14.14 Key Terms
Agricultural year — the farming year in India, running from July to June.
Agro-based industries — industries that take their raw material directly from farm produce, such as cotton, sugar and oil mills.
Animal husbandry — the branch of farming concerned with rearing and caring for livestock.
Area sown more than once — land that carries a second or third crop in the same year, counted again for each extra crop.
Arid — a moisture zone receiving less than 30 cm of rainfall a year, where no crop grows without irrigation.
Biocides — the family of pesticides, herbicides and weedicides used to protect crops from pests, weeds and disease.
Buffer stock — a reserve of grain held by the government for lean times and to steady prices.
Capitalistic farming — farming in which better-off farmers invest large sums in seed, fertiliser and machinery to earn still more.
Commercial agriculture — farming carried on to produce a surplus for sale in the market.
Consolidation of holdings — pooling a farmer’s scattered strips of land into one workable block.
Crop rotation — growing different crops in a fixed succession on the same field, so one restores what another removes.
Cropping intensity — the gross cropped area expressed as a percentage of the net sown area; a measure of how hard the land is worked.
Dairying — the production of milk from cattle and buffaloes.
Distress sale — selling a crop at once, at a low price, because the farmer cannot afford to wait for a better one.
Diversification — broadening farming beyond food crops into fibre, beverage, cash and horticulture crops and allied activities.
Dry farming — farming in areas of less than 75 cm annual rainfall, using hardy crops and careful moisture conservation.
Farm mechanisation — replacing human and animal labour with machines such as tractors, pump sets and threshers.
Floriculture — the commercial cultivation of flowers.
Fragmentation — the scattering of a family’s land into several small, separated plots through repeated division.
Green Revolution — the steep rise in food-grain output from the mid-1960s, achieved by combining high-yielding seeds with fertiliser, irrigation and machines.
Gross cropped area — the net sown area plus the area sown more than once; total cropped area across the year.
High-yielding variety (HYV) — a crop bred to give far more grain from the same field, typically a dwarf plant that responds to fertiliser and water.
Horticulture — the science of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers and ornamental crops.
Institutional credit — loans to farmers from cooperative and commercial banks at fair terms, as against the moneylender.
Isohyet — a line on a map joining places that receive equal amounts of rainfall.
Kharif — the monsoon crop season, sown with the rains around June–July and harvested at the start of winter.
Legumes — the pulse family of plants, including groundnut, whose root nodules fix nitrogen in the soil.
Market gardening — the intensive growing of vegetables, fruits and flowers for sale, usually near towns and cities.
Marketable surplus — the part of the harvest left after the family’s own needs, available for sale.
Micro-irrigation — sprinkler and drip systems that deliver water with far less waste than flooding a field.
Net sown area — the land actually sown at least once in the year, counted once however many crops it carries.
Nitrogen fixation — the turning of air-nitrogen, which plants cannot use, into soil-nitrogen, which they can.
Orchard farming — the growing of fruit trees in orchards.
Organic farming — farming that replaces synthetic chemicals with integrated pest and nutrient management.
Precision farming — using information technology to apply seed, water and fertiliser exactly where each is needed across a field.
Rabi — the winter crop season, sown around October–November and harvested in spring.
Rain-fed — farming in which rain is the only source of moisture for the crop.
Ratooning — cutting a cane crop but leaving the root, so a fresh crop grows from the stubble.
Regulated market — an official marketplace with standard weights, open bidding and dispute settlement, to protect the producer.
Second Green Revolution — a drive to raise farm output by sustainable means that protect soil, water and biodiversity.
Semi-arid — a moisture zone receiving 30–75 cm of rainfall a year, drought-prone and short of moisture the year round.
Sub-humid — a moisture zone receiving 75–100 cm of rainfall a year, short of moisture for about two-thirds of it.
Subsistence agriculture — farming carried on mainly to feed the farmer’s own family, with little or no surplus to sell.
Sustainable agriculture — farming that raises output while protecting the soil, water and biodiversity it depends on.
Tilth — the loose, crumbly condition of soil that lets roots spread and water soak in.
Ultimate Irrigation Potential — the largest area of land that could ever be irrigated once all water sources are fully developed.
Wet farming — farming in areas of more than 75 cm annual rainfall, allowing a wider range of crops.
Zaid — the short summer crop season between the rabi harvest and the next kharif sowing.
14.15 Points to Ponder
The 100 cm rainfall line once decided whether a field grew rice or wheat. Now that tube-wells can put water almost anywhere, is that line disappearing — or has it simply moved underground, into a falling water table?
Cropping intensity rewards a farmer for raising three crops where one grew before. But if each extra crop draws more water and nutrient from the same soil, is a higher intensity always a sign of better farming, or sometimes of soil being spent faster than it can recover?
The Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in food, yet widened the gap between large and small farmers. If a policy feeds a nation but deepens its inequalities, how should we weigh what it achieved against whom it left behind?
India keeps the largest cattle herd on Earth but takes little milk from each animal. Is the countryside better served by many low-yielding animals that can be fed cheaply, or by fewer high-yielding ones that must be fed well?
A farmer near a city can earn far more from vegetables than from grain — yet vegetables cannot feed a nation, and grain barely pays. If every farmer grew the most profitable crop, who would grow the food?
Jute lost its best land to another country at Partition, and the mills near Kolkata have been short of raw fibre ever since. Can a crop be well located for one century and badly located for the next, without the land itself changing at all?
14.16 Objective Questions
- Choose the correct option. The line of annual rainfall that separates dry farming from wet farming is: [1 mark]
- 50 cm
- 75 cm
- 100 cm
- 150 cm
- Choose the correct option. Which of the following crops enriches the soil with nitrogen and is grown in rotation with cereals? [1 mark]
- Wheat
- Rice
- Gram
- Sugarcane
- Choose the correct option. Cropping intensity is calculated as: [1 mark]
- Net sown area ÷ gross cropped area × 100
- Gross cropped area ÷ net sown area × 100
- Area sown more than once ÷ net sown area
- Gross cropped area − net sown area
- Choose the correct option. The leading producer of coffee in India is: [1 mark]
- Kerala
- Tamil Nadu
- Karnataka
- Assam
- Assertion (A): The Green Revolution in India is often called a Wheat Revolution. Reason (R): Wheat gained far more from the new high-yielding seeds than most other crops did.
- Both A and R are true and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Rice is grown as an irrigated crop in Punjab and Haryana. Reason (R): Punjab and Haryana receive more than 150 cm of annual rainfall.
- Both A and R are true and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match the crop in List I with its leading producing state in List II. [1 mark]
| List I | List II |
|---|---|
| a. Jute | i. Karnataka |
| b. Coffee | ii. Assam |
| c. Groundnut | iii. West Bengal |
| d. Tea | iv. Gujarat |
Fill in the blank. The short summer crop season that falls between the rabi harvest and the next kharif sowing is called the ______ season. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false. India is the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world. [1 mark]
14.17 Check Your Concepts
Define cropping intensity and state the formula used to calculate it. [2 marks]
What is meant by the term ‘marketable surplus’? [2 marks]
Differentiate between wet farming and dry farming, giving one example of a crop grown under each. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why cropping intensity is high on the northern plains but low in Rajasthan. [3 marks]
Explain how crop rotation restores fertility to the soil, using one Indian example of a rotation. [4 marks]
‘The Green Revolution was not neutral to regions and to classes of farmers.’ Evaluate this claim. [4 marks]
Describe the conditions of growth and the distribution in India of either rice or sugarcane. [6 marks]
Discuss the merits and demerits of the Green Revolution, with reference to Indian examples. [6 marks]
14.18 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
- Study Table 14.1 (cropping intensity of selected states, 2018-19) and answer:
- Which state in the table has the highest cropping intensity, and which the lowest? [1]
- By how many percentage points does Punjab’s intensity exceed the All India figure? [1]
- What does a state’s average cropping intensity fail to tell you about the districts within it? [2] [4 marks]
- Study Fig. 14.5-1 (India’s fertiliser consumption) and answer:
- Describe the overall trend in fertiliser use between 1990-91 and 2020-21. [1]
- By roughly how many times did consumption change over this period? [1]
- What does this national total fail to reveal about fertiliser use across India? [1] [3 marks]
- In one agricultural year a state had a net sown area of 5,000 thousand hectares and a gross cropped area of 8,500 thousand hectares.
- Using the cropping-intensity formula, calculate the state’s cropping intensity. [2]
- What does the result tell you about how its land is used? [1] [3 marks]
- With reference to Fig. 14.9-1 (the crop-season cycle):
- Name the three crop seasons in the order in which they occur through the year. [1]
- State the sowing and harvesting time of the rabi season. [1]
- Explain why a zaid crop can be grown only where irrigation is available. [2] [4 marks]
- On an outline map of India, locate and label the following:
- A major rice-producing area. [1]
- The leading tea-producing state. [1]
- A major cotton-growing region on the Deccan. [1]
- The leading sugarcane-producing state. [1]
- A major jute-growing area. [1] [5 marks]