Chapter 18 — 5.7 Agriculture in India

Agriculture is the art and science of cultivating the soil, raising crops and rearing animals for food, fibre and other products. In India it is not only an occupation but the foundation of the economy and the way of life of the majority of the people. Its importance can be stated in figures. About 45 per cent of the working population is engaged in agriculture and allied activities, more than in any other sector, though its share of the national income has fallen to about 16-18 per cent as industry and services have grown. India is the largest producer of milk, pulses, jute, spices and tea, the second largest of rice, wheat, sugarcane, cotton, groundnut, fruits and vegetables, and produces over 330 million tonnes of foodgrains a year, enough to feed itself and to export. Agriculture supplies the raw material of the cotton, jute, sugar, tea, edible oil and food-processing industries, which together are the largest industrial group; it earns foreign exchange through tea, rice, spices, cotton and marine products; it provides the market for fertilisers, tractors, pumps and consumer goods; and it is the source of the food security on which the country's stability depends.

Indian agriculture has certain characteristics that the examination expects. It is subsistence-oriented: most farmers grow food for their own families first and sell only the surplus. It is dependent on the monsoon: about 55 per cent of the net sown area has no irrigation, so the harvest follows the rain. It is dominated by food crops, which occupy about two-thirds of the cropped area, chiefly rice and wheat. It is carried on in small and fragmented holdings: the average holding is about 1.1 hectares and 86 per cent of holdings are below 2 hectares, often in scattered plots, which makes machinery and irrigation uneconomic. It is labour-intensive, using human and animal power, though tractors and pumps are spreading. Its productivity is low by world standards: the rice yield of about 2.7 tonnes per hectare is less than half that of China or Japan. It has a great variety of crops, tropical and temperate, because of the range of climate. And it is old and traditional in methods, though the Green Revolution has changed the irrigated regions completely.

Geographers also note the pressure of population on the land: the net sown area of about 140 million hectares has stopped growing, so more food must come from higher yields and more crops a year, measured by the cropping intensity, the gross cropped area divided by the net sown area, now about 142 per cent.

Farming in India takes several forms, according to the environment, the size of the holding, the purpose and the technology. Subsistence farming is farming for the family's own food, with little surplus for sale; it is the oldest and commonest type, practised on small holdings with traditional tools and family labour. Commercial farming grows crops for sale, uses purchased inputs such as improved seed, fertiliser and irrigation, and is found in the Green Revolution states of Punjab and Haryana and in the sugarcane, cotton and plantation regions.

Intensive farming gets the most out of a small area by applying much labour and capital, growing two or three crops a year with irrigation and manure; it is the farming of the Ganga delta, the Kerala coast and the irrigated plains, wherever population is dense and land is scarce. Extensive farming spreads over large areas with less labour per hectare, usually with machines, giving a low yield per hectare but a high yield per worker; it is rare in India but is found in the large mechanised wheat farms of Punjab and the newer lands of the Terai and Rajasthan canal.

Shifting cultivation, called jhum in the north-east, podu in Andhra and Odisha, bewar or dahiya in Madhya Pradesh and kumari in the Western Ghats, is the primitive farming of the hill tribes: a patch of forest is cut and burnt in the dry season, seeds of rice, maize, millets and vegetables are sown in the ash with a digging stick, the plot is cropped for two or three years until the fertility is exhausted, and then abandoned for a fresh patch while the forest regrows. It supports about 10 lakh families in Arunachal, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura, but as population has grown the fallow has shortened from twenty years to three or four, the forest cannot recover, and the slopes are eroded; governments are trying to replace it with terraced and settled farming.

Plantation agriculture is the large-scale, capital-intensive growing of a single commercial crop on a large estate for export or industry, introduced by the British: tea in Assam, north Bengal and the Nilgiris, coffee in Karnataka, rubber in Kerala, coconut, spices and cardamom in the south. It needs a large area, much labour, scientific management, processing factories on the estate and good transport. Mixed farming combines crops with the rearing of cattle, poultry or fish on the same farm, so that each supports the other, and is spreading with dairying. Dry farming is the growing of drought-resistant crops such as jowar, bajra and pulses in regions of low rainfall without irrigation, conserving the soil moisture by deep ploughing and mulching, as in the Deccan and Rajasthan. Wet farming is the cultivation of rice and jute in the humid regions with standing water in the fields. And organic farming, which uses no chemical fertiliser or pesticide, is growing in Sikkim, the first fully organic state, and among exporters of tea and spices.

Because India's rainfall is concentrated in the monsoon months and temperature is warm enough for growth all year in most of the country, the farming year is divided into three cropping seasons. The words kharif and rabi are Arabic, meaning autumn and spring, the seasons of harvest, and were brought into Indian revenue records by the Mughals.

The kharif season is the season of the south-west monsoon. Kharif crops are sown with the first rains in June-July and harvested at the end of the rains in September-October. They are the crops that need warmth and abundant water: rice, the greatest of them, maize, jowar, bajra, ragi, the pulses arhar (tur), moong and urad, the oilseeds groundnut, soyabean and sesame, and the fibres cotton and jute. In the rice regions of Bengal, Assam and the south the season is extended by early (aus) and late (aman) plantings.

The rabi season is the winter. Rabi crops are sown in October-December, after the retreat of the monsoon, in the moisture the rains have left in the soil, grow through the cool dry winter, and are harvested in March-April. They are the crops of temperate origin that need a cool growing season and a warm harvest: wheat, the chief of them, barley, gram (chana), peas, lentil (masur), the oilseeds mustard, rapeseed and linseed, and potato. In the north-west they are helped by the light winter rain of the western disturbances and by canal and tube-well irrigation, and the Green Revolution was above all a rabi wheat revolution.

The zaid season is the short hot season between the rabi harvest and the kharif sowing, from March to June. Zaid crops are grown only on irrigated land or on the moist beds of rivers: watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, gourds and other vegetables, fodder crops, and in Bengal and the south the irrigated boro rice and summer moong. The zaid crops are a small share of production but a valuable use of the fallow months.

The three seasons make multiple cropping possible: an irrigated field in the Ganga delta may carry aman rice in the kharif, potato or mustard in the rabi and boro rice or vegetables in the zaid, three harvests in a year, which is how a small holding feeds a large family. In the unirrigated regions of the Deccan and Rajasthan only the kharif crop is certain and the field lies fallow through the winter. Where the climate is uniform, as in Kerala and the Tamil Nadu coast with its winter rain, the seasons are less sharp and rice is grown almost the year round in overlapping plantings.

Rice is the staple food of about two-thirds of Indians, the chief crop of the country by area and production, and the crop that decides the fortune of the eastern and southern states. India produces about 130 million tonnes a year on about 45 million hectares, second only to China, and is the world's largest exporter, chiefly of basmati.

Rice is a tropical plant and needs heat and water. The temperature must be high, 20-27°C during growth and above 24°C for ripening, with no frost; the season must be long, 100-150 days. Rainfall of 100-200 cm is needed, or irrigation where it is less, because the plant must stand in 5-10 cm of water for most of its growth; rice is the greatest user of irrigation water in India. The soil should be a heavy clay or clay loam that holds water, the alluvium of the deltas and river plains being ideal. The land should be level so that water can stand, which is why the deltas and flood plains grow it, and why the hills terrace their slopes for it. And rice needs abundant cheap labour for transplanting, weeding and harvesting, so it is grown where population is dense.

There are three methods of sowing. Broadcasting scatters the seed by hand on the ploughed field; it is quick and cheap but gives a poor yield, and is used for the early aus crop and in dry uplands. Drilling sows the seed in furrows behind the plough, giving a more even stand. Transplanting raises the seedlings in a nursery bed for three or four weeks and then plants them by hand in rows in the flooded field; it is slow and needs much labour but gives the highest yield and is the method of the main aman crop of Bengal and of most of India. The Japanese method is transplanting of high-yielding varieties in rows with heavy manuring and careful weeding.

In West Bengal, Assam and Odisha there are three crops: aus, sown in April-May and harvested in August-September, the early rain-fed crop of the uplands; aman, transplanted in June-July and harvested in November-December, the main monsoon crop and about 70 per cent of the state's production; and boro, the irrigated winter-summer crop sown in December-January and harvested in April-May, the highest-yielding of the three.

The leading states are West Bengal, first with about 16 million tonnes, then Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Assam. Rice is grown wherever there is water: the whole eastern coast and delta belt, the Ganga and Brahmaputra plains, the Kerala coast, the Kashmir valley, and, since the Green Revolution, the irrigated plains of Punjab and Haryana, which have the highest yield in India at about 4 tonnes per hectare, though they are naturally dry. West Bengal, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh together produce about 40 per cent of the country's rice.

Wheat is the second food crop of India and the staple of the north-west. It is a crop of temperate origin, grown in India as a rabi crop in the cool winter, and the crop on which the Green Revolution was first and most fully worked out. India produces about 110 million tonnes a year on about 31 million hectares, second in the world after China, and has moved from importing wheat under PL-480 in the 1960s to exporting it.

Wheat needs a cool, moist growing season and a warm, dry, bright ripening season. The temperature should be 10-15°C at sowing and during growth and 21-26°C at ripening; frost at flowering and rain or cloud at harvest damage the crop, and the heat of an early summer shrivels the grain. Rainfall of 50-75 cm, well distributed, is ideal; where it is less, as in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, irrigation supplies the water, and the light winter showers of the western disturbances are of great value. It cannot be grown well where rainfall exceeds 100 cm or where the winter is warm and humid, which is why eastern and southern India grow little. The soil should be a well-drained fertile loam or clay loam; the alluvium of the northern plain and the black soil of Madhya Pradesh suit it. The land should be level for irrigation and machinery, and wheat, unlike rice, is suited to mechanisation: the Punjab farmer ploughs with a tractor, sows with a seed drill and reaps with a combine harvester.

Wheat is sown in October-November and harvested in March-April; in the Baisakhi harvest festival of Punjab and the Holi of the plains the wheat harvest is celebrated. The high-yielding dwarf varieties bred from Mexican stock by Norman Borlaug and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Kalyan Sona, Sonalika and their successors, need heavy fertiliser and four or five irrigations and give 4-5 tonnes per hectare against the 1 tonne of the old tall varieties.

The wheat belt is the north-western plain: Uttar Pradesh is first in production with about a third of the total, then Punjab and Haryana, which have the highest yields, then Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Punjab and Haryana, with under 5 per cent of India's area, supply about a quarter of its wheat and most of the grain procured for the public distribution system. West Bengal grows a little wheat in the winter in Murshidabad, Nadia and Birbhum, about 1 million tonnes, but its warm humid winter limits it.

The millets, jowar, bajra and ragi, are the coarse grains or, in the new name that honours their nutrition, the nutri-cereals. They are the food of the dry regions, hardy plants that grow on poor soil with little rain, ripen in three months and give both grain and fodder, and they were the main food of the Deccan and Rajasthan until wheat and rice from the public distribution system displaced them. India is the world's largest producer of millets, and 2023 was declared the International Year of Millets on India's proposal.

Jowar (sorghum) is the third food crop by area. It needs a temperature of 26-33°C, rainfall of 30-100 cm and can grow on the black and red soils of the peninsula; it is a kharif crop in the north and a rabi crop in the Deccan. Maharashtra is the leading producer, followed by Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Bajra (pearl millet) is the hardiest, growing on sandy soil with 40-60 cm of rain and temperature of 25-30°C, and is the crop of the desert edge: Rajasthan first, then Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Ragi (finger millet), rich in calcium and iron, grows on the red soils of the dry south with 50-100 cm of rain; Karnataka is first, then Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and Maharashtra, and it is the staple of rural Karnataka.

Maize is used both as food and as feed and industrial raw material for starch, glucose and poultry feed, and its area is growing fast. It needs a temperature of 21-27°C, rainfall of 50-100 cm, and a well-drained fertile loam; it is chiefly a kharif crop but rabi maize on irrigated land in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh gives the highest yields. The leaders are Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. Barley, a rabi cereal of the dry north-west used for food, feed and malt, is grown in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Pulses are the leguminous crops, gram (chana), arhar (tur), moong, urad, masur (lentil), peas and beans, and are the main source of protein in a largely vegetarian diet. India is the largest producer and consumer in the world, with about 25 million tonnes on about 30 million hectares, and still imports. Pulses are hardy, need little water, 50-75 cm, and grow on poor soils; gram, masur and peas are rabi crops, arhar, moong and urad kharif. Being legumes they fix nitrogen from the air through the bacteria in their root nodules and restore the fertility of the soil, so they are grown in rotation with cereals and as a mixed crop. The leading producers are Madhya Pradesh first, then Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Their yield has stayed low because they are grown on the poorest unirrigated land, and the Government's pulses mission promotes them with better seed and support prices.

Sugarcane is the most important commercial crop of India and the raw material of the sugar, gur, khandsari, alcohol and paper industries. India is the original home of the plant, the second largest producer after Brazil, with about 400 million tonnes on about 5 million hectares, and the largest consumer of sugar in the world.

Sugarcane is a tropical grass that needs a long, hot, humid growing season of 10-15 months and a short, cool, dry ripening period in which the sugar concentrates in the stem. The temperature should be 21-27°C, frost is fatal, and hot dry winds reduce the juice. Rainfall of 100-150 cm is needed through the growing months, or irrigation, which is why the cane of Uttar Pradesh is grown on canals and tube-wells and that of Maharashtra on the water of the Deccan dams; the plant is one of the thirstiest crops and takes 1,500-2,500 mm of water in a season. The soil should be a deep, rich, well-drained loam or black soil, and the crop exhausts the soil so much that heavy manuring is needed. Cane is heavy and bulky and loses sugar within a day of cutting, so it must be crushed within 24 hours, and the sugar mills stand in the cane fields with a radius of a few kilometres. It needs much labour for planting the setts, weeding, cutting and carrying.

Cane is planted from cuttings called setts in February-March in the north and in December-January or June-July in the south, and harvested after 10-12 months; the ratoon crop that springs from the stubble is harvested for one or two more years at a lower yield.

There are two cane regions. The northern belt of the Ganga plain, chiefly western and central Uttar Pradesh (Meerut, Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor, Moradabad, Bareilly), the Terai of Uttarakhand, Bihar, Haryana and Punjab, grows about half of India's cane but with a lower yield and lower sugar content, because the winter is cold, the summer hot and dry and the crop stands only 10 months. The southern or peninsular belt of Maharashtra (Ahmednagar, Pune, Kolhapur, Sangli, Solapur), Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, grows less cane but with a much higher yield per hectare and higher sugar content, because the tropical climate is uniform and the cane stands 12-18 months. Uttar Pradesh is the first producer of cane and Maharashtra the first producer of sugar. In West Bengal a little cane is grown in Nadia, Murshidabad and Bardhaman for gur.

Cotton is India's chief fibre crop and the raw material of the cotton textile industry, the largest industry of the country. India was the first land to grow and weave cotton, and today it is the largest producer in the world, with about 35 million bales of 170 kg on about 13 million hectares, and a large exporter of raw cotton and yarn.

Cotton is a kharif crop of the tropics and sub-tropics. It needs a high, uniform temperature of 21-30°C and a frost-free season of at least 200 days; bright sunshine during the ripening and picking of the bolls, since rain or cloud at picking stains the fibre; and a moderate rainfall of 50-100 cm, well spread through the growing season but dry at the end; where rainfall is less, as in Punjab and Gujarat, irrigation supplies it. The soil should be deep, retentive and well drained: the black regur of the Deccan, which holds the monsoon moisture through the dry months, is the ideal cotton soil, and this is why the Deccan is the traditional cotton land; the alluvium of Punjab and Haryana grows it under irrigation. Cotton needs cheap labour for the picking of the bolls by hand, which takes place in three or four rounds from October to January, and for weeding. Sea breezes on the coast help.

Cotton is sown in May-June in the north and June-July in the Deccan and picked from October to January. Since 2002 most Indian cotton is Bt cotton, a genetically modified variety resistant to the bollworm, which doubled the yield within a decade, though the crop remains vulnerable to pests and to the failure of the monsoon, and the distress of cotton farmers in Vidarbha is a recurring problem. Long-staple cotton, best for fine cloth, is grown in Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra; medium and short-staple in the Deccan.

The cotton belt is the black-soil plateau and the north-western plain. Gujarat is the first producer, followed by Maharashtra (Vidarbha, Marathwada, Khandesh), Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab; Tamil Nadu grows the fine Cambodia cotton under irrigation. Mumbai, the first cotton port, was built on the trade in Deccan cotton, and Ahmedabad and Coimbatore grew as its mill towns. West Bengal grows no cotton of importance, though Kolkata's mills spin imported cotton.

Jute, the golden fibre, is the second fibre crop of India and the crop that ties the agriculture of West Bengal to its oldest industry. The fibre is taken from the bark of the jute plant, a tall annual of the Ganga delta, and is spun into sacking, hessian, carpet backing, rope, twine and, increasingly, decorative bags and geotextiles. India is the largest producer in the world with about 10 million bales of 180 kg, followed by Bangladesh, and West Bengal grows about three-quarters of India's crop.

Jute needs a hot, humid climate with a temperature of 24-35°C and relative humidity of 80-90 per cent; a heavy rainfall of 150-250 cm during the growing months, with the pre-monsoon Kalbaishakhi showers of April-May to sow it in and the monsoon to grow it; a fertile alluvial soil, renewed every year by the floods, since the plant exhausts the soil badly and the new alluvium (khadar) of the delta is the ideal, sandy loam being better than heavy clay; plenty of clean, slow-moving water for the retting of the stalks, in which the cut plants are steeped in ponds, ditches and river backwaters for two or three weeks until the bacteria rot the bark and the fibre can be stripped, washed and dried; and abundant cheap labour for sowing, weeding, cutting, retting, stripping and drying, all done by hand. These conditions are met exactly in the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, which is the reason jute is a Bengal crop.

Jute is sown by broadcasting in March-May after the first showers, grows 3-4 m tall in four months, and is cut in July-September when it flowers, before the aman rice is transplanted on the same field; it is thus a kharif crop that fits before rice. Two species are grown: the white jute (Corchorus capsularis) of the lowlands and the finer tossa jute (Corchorus olitorius) of the higher land.

The jute belt is the delta. West Bengal is first with about 75 per cent, in Nadia, Murshidabad, Hooghly, North 24 Parganas, Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur and Howrah; then Bihar (Purnea, Katihar, Kishanganj), Assam, Odisha, Meghalaya and Tripura. Before the Partition of 1947 the best jute land went to East Pakistan while the mills stayed on the Hooghly, and India has since expanded its own growing and turned the Uttar Dinajpur and Cooch Behar districts into jute country. The crop faces competition from synthetic fibres and plastic packaging, and its price is supported by the compulsory use of jute bags for foodgrain and sugar.

Tea is the beverage crop of the humid hills and the great plantation crop of eastern India. It was introduced from China by the British in Assam in the 1830s, and India is now the second largest producer in the world after China, with about 1,350 million kg a year, and the largest consumer; it exports about 200 million kg, chiefly to Russia, the Gulf, Britain and the United States. The tea bush is an evergreen shrub whose young leaves and buds are plucked, withered, rolled, fermented and dried into black tea, or steamed unfermented into green tea.

Tea needs a warm, humid, frost-free climate with a temperature of 20-30°C and humidity above 80 per cent, and a heavy, well-distributed rainfall of 150-300 cm with no long dry season, so that the bush keeps producing new flush leaves; it grows best in the mist and cloud of the hill slopes. The soil must be deep, fertile, rich in humus, acidic (pH 4.5-5.5) and, above all, well drained, because the bush cannot stand water at its roots; this is why tea is grown on hill slopes and on the gently sloping foothills, never on flat waterlogged plains. It needs shade trees against the direct sun, and abundant cheap skilled labour for the plucking of the two leaves and a bud every seven to ten days through the season, most of it done by women. And it needs a factory on the estate for immediate processing, and capital and organised management, which is why it is grown on large estates called gardens.

The tea regions are three. Assam, the first producer with about half of India's tea, grows a strong, dark, malty tea on the Brahmaputra valley foothills and the Surma valley of Cachar, at Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Sibsagar, Tezpur and Silchar. West Bengal is second with about a quarter: the Darjeeling hills at 1,000-2,000 m grow the fine, light, aromatic tea that has a Geographical Indication and is the most expensive in the world, in about 87 gardens, and the Duars and Terai of Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and Darjeeling district's plains grow the strong CTC tea of the mass market. The south, the Nilgiri, Anaimalai and Cardamom hills of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, grows about a fifth, with Coonoor, Munnar and Wayanad as its centres. Small quantities come from Himachal (Kangra), Uttarakhand, Tripura and Sikkim. Kolkata, Guwahati and Kochi hold the tea auctions.

Coffee, introduced by the Sufi saint Baba Budan to the Chikmagalur hills of Karnataka in the seventeenth century, needs a temperature of 15-28°C, rainfall of 150-250 cm, shade, and well-drained slopes at 600-1,600 m on the laterite and red soils of the Western Ghats. Karnataka (Kodagu, Chikmagalur, Hassan) grows about 70 per cent of India's coffee, Kerala (Wayanad) and Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris) most of the rest, and both arabica and the hardier robusta are grown, largely for export.

The oilseeds are the crops from whose seeds cooking oil is pressed, and the cake that remains is cattle feed and manure. India is the largest producer of oilseeds in the world with about 40 million tonnes on about 28 million hectares, yet because of its huge population it is also the largest importer of edible oil, chiefly palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia and soyabean oil from South America; more than half of the oil consumed is imported, which is why the Government's oilseeds mission and the new oil-palm plantations of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and the north-east are a priority.

Groundnut is the largest oilseed of the kharif season. It needs a temperature of 20-30°C, rainfall of 50-75 cm and a light sandy loam or red soil in which its pods can form underground; Gujarat (Saurashtra) is first, then Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Mustard and rapeseed (sarson, toria, rai) are the rabi oilseeds of the north, grown in the cool winter on the alluvium with 25-40 cm of rain or irrigation; Rajasthan is first, then Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, where mustard covers the winter fields of Nadia, Murshidabad and Bardhaman with yellow flowers and gives the oil of Bengali cooking. Soyabean, introduced in the 1970s, has become the largest oilseed by production; it is a kharif crop of the black soils of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan and is grown mainly for meal and export. Sesame (til) is grown in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat; linseed in Madhya Pradesh; sunflower in Karnataka; castor in Gujarat; and coconut in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which supplies the copra oil of the south.

Among the other crops the examination names, rubber is a plantation crop of the equatorial climate, needing over 25°C and 200 cm of rain on the laterite slopes of Kerala, which grows about 90 per cent of India's rubber in Kottayam and Kozhikode, with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Tripura following. Tobacco, needing a frost-free season, 50-100 cm of rain and a well-drained sandy loam, is grown in Andhra Pradesh (Guntur, Prakasam) and Gujarat (Kheda, Anand), with Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal's Cooch Behar behind. Spices, pepper, cardamom, ginger, turmeric and chilli, are the crops of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and India is the largest producer and exporter of spices in the world. Potato, a rabi crop of the cool north, is grown in Uttar Pradesh first and West Bengal second, in Hooghly, Bardhaman and Paschim Medinipur, with cold storages every few kilometres. And horticulture, fruits and vegetables, now produces more than foodgrains by weight, with the mango of Malda and Uttar Pradesh, the banana of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, the apple of Himachal and Kashmir, the orange of Nagpur and Darjeeling and the litchi of Bihar and Bengal.

The Green Revolution is the name given to the rapid increase in foodgrain production in India from the late 1960s through the introduction of high-yielding varieties (HYV) of seed together with irrigation, chemical fertiliser, pesticides and machinery. The term was coined by William Gaud of the United States in 1968, and in India the movement is associated with the agricultural scientist Dr M. S. Swaminathan, the Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, whose Mexican dwarf wheat was its starting point, and the food minister C. Subramaniam. It began with the introduction of the Mexican wheat in the kharif of 1966-67 and of the IR-8 rice from the Philippines, and its first decade transformed the north-west.

Its components or the new agricultural strategy were: the HYV seeds of wheat (Kalyan Sona, Sonalika, later HD-2967), rice (IR-8, Jaya, Ratna, later Swarna), maize, jowar and bajra, which were short-stemmed, matured quickly and responded to fertiliser without lodging; assured irrigation by canals and, above all, tube-wells, because the HYVs needed water at fixed times; chemical fertilisers (urea, DAP, potash) in heavy doses, the consumption of which rose from 1 million tonnes in 1966 to over 30 million tonnes now; pesticides and weedicides; farm machinery, tractors, threshers, pumps and combine harvesters; credit from cooperative and nationalised banks; minimum support prices and assured procurement by the Food Corporation of India (set up 1965), so that the farmer could invest without fear of a price collapse; agricultural research and extension through the ICAR institutes and the agricultural universities of Ludhiana and Pantnagar; and the consolidation of holdings in Punjab and Haryana.

Its achievements were large. Foodgrain production rose from 72 million tonnes in 1965-66 to 130 million tonnes by 1980, 200 million by 2000 and over 330 million now; wheat rose from 10 million to 110 million tonnes. India, which had imported 10 million tonnes of wheat a year under the American PL-480 programme and lived 'from ship to mouth', became self-sufficient in foodgrains by the mid-1970s, built up a buffer stock, ended famine and became an exporter. Farm incomes in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh rose, rural markets for industry expanded, and the rice-wheat rotation of the north-west now feeds the public distribution system.

Its drawbacks are equally important for the examination. It was regionally unequal: it succeeded in the irrigated wheat lands of the north-west and the delta rice lands and bypassed the rain-fed Deccan, Rajasthan and the eastern states for two decades, widening regional gaps. It was crop-unequal: wheat and rice gained, while pulses, oilseeds and millets, the crops of the poor and the dry land, were neglected and their area fell. It favoured large farmers who could afford tube-wells, fertiliser and tractors, and small farmers and landless labourers gained less, though the labour demand of the double crop helped them. It had environmental costs: the over-pumping of tube-wells has lowered the water table of Punjab and Haryana by a metre a year; the heavy use of fertiliser and pesticide has polluted the ground water and the soil, reduced organic matter and caused the 'cancer train' districts of Malwa in Punjab; the monoculture of rice-wheat has exhausted the soil and increased pests; and waterlogging and salinity have spread in the canal commands. And the new dependence on purchased inputs has put farmers into debt when prices fall or the monsoon fails. The response is the call for a second, 'evergreen' revolution that extends the gains to the rain-fed east and dry lands, pulses and oilseeds, with sustainable methods.

The modern inputs on which Indian agriculture increasingly depends are irrigation, seeds, fertilisers, machinery, credit and extension. Irrigation is the first of them, because rain falls in four months and is unreliable, and because the HYV seeds demand water on schedule. About 52 per cent of the net sown area is now irrigated, chiefly by wells and tube-wells (about 63 per cent of the irrigated area), canals (about 24 per cent) and tanks (about 3 per cent), with sprinklers and drip on the rest. Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh are over 80 per cent irrigated; Maharashtra, Karnataka and Jharkhand under 30 per cent; West Bengal about 60 per cent, mainly by shallow tube-wells and the DVC and Mayurakshi canals. The over-use of ground water in the north-west and the Deccan is now the greatest threat to the sustainability of irrigated farming, and micro-irrigation by drip and sprinkler, which uses half the water, is being spread by subsidy, especially in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Seeds are the cheapest input with the largest effect. The HYVs of the Green Revolution have been followed by hybrids of rice, maize, bajra and cotton, by Bt cotton (2002), by salt-tolerant and flood-tolerant rice for the coast and the delta such as Swarna-Sub1, and by the National Seeds Corporation and state seed farms that multiply certified seed. Fertilisers, nitrogen (urea), phosphorus (DAP, superphosphate) and potash, are used at about 130 kg per hectare of nutrient, unevenly, most in Punjab and least in the east; the ideal ratio of N:P:K is 4:2:1 and the actual ratio is badly skewed to nitrogen because urea is heavily subsidised. The Soil Health Card scheme tests fields and prescribes doses, and organic manure, compost, green manure and bio-fertilisers are promoted to restore the soil. Pesticides control the pests that intensive cropping breeds, but their misuse poisons food, water and the farmers themselves, and integrated pest management using resistant varieties, natural predators and minimal spraying is the safer course.

Mechanisation is spreading, with tractors, power tillers, pumps, threshers, combine harvesters and transplanters, fastest in the wheat states where holdings are larger and labour scarcer; in the rice states custom hiring of machines by cooperatives and panchayats lets small farmers use them. Credit from cooperative banks, regional rural banks, commercial banks and the Kisan Credit Card has partly replaced the moneylender, though rural indebtedness remains a cause of farmer distress. Extension through the Krishi Vigyan Kendras, agricultural universities, radio, television and mobile phone services carries research to the field, and the e-NAM electronic market, the minimum support prices for 23 crops and the crop insurance scheme are meant to protect the farmer's income. The newest technologies are precision farming with sensors and satellites, protected cultivation in polyhouses, and the use of solar pumps.

Indian agriculture feeds a fifth of humanity, but it does so with difficulty, and the examination expects a clear statement of its problems and of the measures taken against them.

The physical problems are the dependence on the monsoon, which fails in one year out of four in some part of the country, so that half the cropped area is a gamble; the erosion and degradation of the soil, described in the soils chapter; the depletion of ground water in the intensively farmed regions; and floods in the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains and droughts in the Deccan and Rajasthan in the same year. The economic and social problems are the small and fragmented holdings, the average 1.1 hectares divided into scattered plots that cannot use machines or irrigation efficiently; the low productivity per hectare and per worker, half or a third of the world's best; the pressure of population, which keeps too many people on too little land as disguised unemployment; the poverty and indebtedness of small farmers, which makes them unable to buy inputs and drives some to suicide when a crop fails; the lack of storage, transport and marketing, so that a tenth of the harvest rots and the middleman takes the profit; unfair prices and the fluctuation of markets; the slow spread of technology to the east and the dry lands; and land tenure, the sharecropping and tenancy that gave the cultivator no security or incentive, which the land reforms after Independence attacked with uneven success, West Bengal's Operation Barga of 1978 being one of the more successful.

The remedies adopted since Independence form a list the student should know. Land reforms: the abolition of zamindari (1950s), the ceiling on holdings, the protection of tenants and the consolidation of fragmented holdings, most complete in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Irrigation: the multipurpose projects, the tube-well revolution, the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme and the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana for micro-irrigation. The Green Revolution and its extension to the east. Institutional credit and the Kisan Credit Card. Support prices and procurement through the Food Corporation of India, and the public distribution system. Crop insurance (Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana). Research and extension through ICAR, the state agricultural universities and the Krishi Vigyan Kendras. Rural infrastructure: roads, electricity, cold storages, regulated markets and the e-NAM electronic market. Diversification into horticulture, dairying (the White Revolution of Operation Flood, which made India the largest milk producer), poultry, fisheries (the Blue Revolution) and agro-processing. Dry-land and watershed development for the rain-fed regions. Organic and sustainable farming. And direct income support such as PM-Kisan. The goal, in the words of the National Commission on Farmers, is to move from a production-centred to a farmer-centred agriculture that doubles farm incomes.

West Bengal is one of the most intensively farmed states in India. With only 2.7 per cent of the country's area it supports about 7.5 per cent of its people, about 60 per cent of them dependent on agriculture, on holdings that average 0.8 hectares, the smallest in the country outside Kerala. About 5.5 million hectares, 62 per cent of the state, is cultivated, and the cropping intensity of about 185 per cent is among the highest in India, because the alluvial soil, the 150-200 cm monsoon and the shallow tube-wells allow two or three crops a year.

Rice is the crop of the state. West Bengal is the first rice producer in India with about 16 million tonnes on 5.5 million hectares, about 13 per cent of the country's crop, grown as aus, aman and boro in every district; the leading districts are Bardhaman (the 'rice bowl'), Paschim Medinipur, Hooghly, Birbhum, Bankura, Murshidabad and Nadia. Jute is the second: the state grows about 75 per cent of India's jute in Nadia, Murshidabad, Hooghly, North 24 Parganas, Cooch Behar, Uttar Dinajpur, Malda and Jalpaiguri, and feeds the mills of the Hooghly. Tea is the third: Darjeeling's 87 gardens and the Duars and Terai gardens of Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar produce about a quarter of India's tea, the state being second after Assam. Potato: West Bengal is second after Uttar Pradesh, with Hooghly, Bardhaman, Paschim Medinipur and Bankura the centres and a chain of cold storages. Wheat is a small winter crop of Murshidabad, Nadia and Birbhum; mustard, sesame, pulses (masur, gram, moong) and vegetables fill the rabi and zaid seasons; sugarcane is grown for gur in Nadia and Bardhaman; tobacco in Cooch Behar; and the state is the largest producer of vegetables in India, supplying Kolkata and the east. In fruit, the mango of Malda and Murshidabad, the litchi of Murshidabad, the pineapple of Siliguri, the orange of Darjeeling and the banana of Hooghly are known across the country. Fish from the ponds of the delta and the Sundarbans make the state the largest inland fish producer in India.

The agricultural regions of the state follow its physiography. The Darjeeling hills grow tea, oranges, cardamom, ginger and potatoes on terraces. The Terai and Duars grow tea, rice, jute, pineapple and tobacco. The Barind and Malda region grows aman rice, mango and jute. The central delta of Murshidabad, Nadia, Bardhaman, Hooghly and Howrah is the intensively cropped core with rice, jute, potato, mustard, wheat, sugarcane and vegetables. The Rarh of Bankura, Purulia and Birbhum on red and laterite soil grows rain-fed aman with pulses and oilseeds, helped by the Mayurakshi and Kangsabati canals. And the Sundarbans and coast grow salt-tolerant aman rice, betel vine, chilli and cashew behind the embankments.

The state's agriculture was transformed after 1977 by land reforms: the redistribution of ceiling-surplus land to over 3 million landless families and Operation Barga, which registered sharecroppers and secured their share, together with the spread of shallow tube-wells and HYV boro rice and the strengthening of panchayats. Rice output doubled in the following two decades. The problems remain tiny holdings, flood in the north and the delta, drought in the Rarh, arsenic in the ground water of Nadia, Murshidabad and the 24 Parganas, salinity in the Sundarbans, the fall of the jute price against synthetics, and the low profit of small farms; the responses are irrigation from the DVC, Mayurakshi, Kangsabati and Teesta projects, watershed schemes in the Rarh, cold storage and marketing, and diversification into vegetables, fruit, fish and flowers.