Agriculture
Agriculture · cropping patterns · MSP · Green Revolution
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What is Indian agriculture?
Indian agriculture is the cultivation of crops and livestock on a net sown area of about 140 million hectares, worked in three seasons — Kharif, sown with the south-west monsoon from June to October; Rabi, from October to March; and the short summer Zaid crop. Minimum support prices, recommended by the CACP, now cover 23 crops.
The story
In 1965, India faced a famine that would reshape its political economy. Successive monsoon failures + the war with Pakistan + the cutoff of US food aid (PL-480) under Lyndon Johnson's "ship-to-mouth" pressure left India with wheat stocks of 4.6 million tonnes to feed 480 million people. PM Lal Bahadur Shastri's appeal to "skip one meal a week" was less a gesture and more an admission of crisis.
Into this stepped a 24-year-old American agronomist, Norman Borlaug, whose semi-dwarf wheat varieties were producing yields 3-5x of traditional Indian varieties. C. Subramaniam, Union Agriculture Minister, took the risk. MS Swaminathan, director of IARI, organised the field trials. K Subramaniam of Punjab Agricultural University trained farmers. From 1966 to 1971, India's wheat production went from 12 million tonnes to 27 million tonnes. The Green Revolution had arrived.
By 2024, India is the world's:
- Largest producer of milk, pulses, jute, mango, banana, mango
- 2nd largest of wheat, rice, fruits, vegetables, sugarcane, cotton
- Largest exporter of rice (especially Basmati)
But the same Green Revolution that fed India is now its biggest soil-environment-water headache: Punjab's water table is dropping 1 m/year; Vidarbha's cotton farmers are dying by suicide; Telangana is paying farmers Rs 16,000/acre to grow palm oil instead of paddy. The 2020-21 farm-law protests at Delhi's borders ended with the Modi government repealing the three laws — a rare political U-turn driven by farmer resistance.
Why this matters for UPSC
Agriculture is the engine room of Indian Geography GS-I and GS-III: 42% of workforce, 18.4% of GVA, 11.4% of exports. Tested every Prelims year (1-2 questions) on MSP, cropping seasons, varieties, schemes. Mains weight is heavy — 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024 all had agriculture questions.