It Is Now Time For The Next Agricultural Revolution In India |
Meteorologists classified the 2026-27 Super El Nino as one of the most intense ones in the past 75 years. As predicted, India witnessed a severe rainfall deficit—12.6%—in this year's monsoon season. And yet, the remarkable feature of our monsoon-fed agriculture is that there is no shortage of food.
In 2025-26, our food grain production was about 377 million tonnes, a record. In the current year, there is likely to be a marginal fall of 1-2%. Our total food grain production in 1950-51 was about 51 million tonnes. Nowadays, our peak storage of food grains in government granaries alone routinely touches 80 million tonnes.
Along with agricultural technologies, our irrigation expanded over the decades. India's gross irrigated area is about 55% of the gross cropped area. Of the irrigated area, about 25% is by canals and 60% by groundwater.
In the past decade, agriculture witnessed a robust annual growth of over 4%. While we are the world's largest importers of cooking oil, we have a modest trade surplus in agriculture.
However, there are many missed opportunities and market distortions in agriculture. Some of the major challenges deserve close attention: overproduction of foodgrains and shortage of other key foods; inefficient water use and depletion of groundwater reserves; misapplication of fertilisers and depletion of soil fertility; and very little storage, processing, and other post-harvest technologies, poor phytosanitary measures, and unrealised export potential. Let us examine each of them briefly.
While we have a glut of food grains,........