Indian Agriculture: Cropping Patterns, Cash Crops and Irrigation

India's cropping pattern rests on two things UPSC likes to test directly: a fixed calendar of growing seasons that shifts by region, and cash crops each tied to a named belt of states, not the whole country evenly. Layered on top is a real government push to make irrigation more efficient, not just bigger, through drip and sprinkler systems. This note stays on land use, cropping and cash crops, and does not repeat the river-basin and dam material already covered in the note on India's drainage systems.

Land Use: Nine Categories, One Reporting Area

Land revenue records classify India's land into nine categories that add up to the country's reporting area (distinct from the fixed geographical area the Survey of India measures): forests, barren and wasteland, land under non-agricultural use, permanent pastures and grazing land, land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves, culturable wasteland, current fallow, fallow other than current fallow, and net sown area.

Between 1950-51 and 2019-20, net sown area rose from 41.7 to 45.6 per cent of reporting area, and recorded forest cover rose from 17 to 23.4 per cent, while culturable wasteland fell sharply, from 8.0 to 3.9 per cent, as more of it was reclaimed for farming. Even so, total cultivable land (net sown area plus all fallow plus culturable wasteland) slipped slightly, from 59.5 to 57.7 per cent of reporting area, so the scope for bringing more land under the plough is now limited. The practical answer has been cropping intensity, Gross Cropped Area divided by Net Sown Area and multiplied by 100, since squeezing more harvests out of the same land does more for output than clearing new land can.

Cropping Seasons and Types of Farming

Northern and interior India runs on three cropping seasons. Kharif (June to September, with the south-west monsoon) grows rice, cotton, bajra, maize, jowar and tur. Rabi (October to March) grows wheat, gram, rapeseed and mustard, and barley. Zaid is a short summer season after the rabi harvest, growing watermelons, cucumbers, vegetables and fodder on irrigated land. Southern India skips this three-way split: temperatures stay high enough year-round for the same crop to be grown thrice in an agricultural year, provided there is enough soil moisture.

Farming is also classified by moisture source: irrigated and rainfed (barani). Rainfed farming splits further into dryland farming, confined to areas with under 75 cm of annual rainfall and growing drought-hardy crops like ragi, bajra, moong, gram and guar, and wetland farming, in moisture-surplus areas growing water-intensive crops such as rice, jute and sugarcane, with fish farmed in the same water bodies.

Cash Crops by Growing Region

Cotton is a kharif crop of semi-arid tropical India, grown across three distinct belts: parts of Punjab, Haryana and northern Rajasthan in the north-west; Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west; and the plateaus of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the south. India ranks second in the world in cotton production after China; yield is highest where the crop is irrigated, in the north-west, and much lower in mostly-rainfed Maharashtra.

Tea is indigenous to the hills of northern China and needs undulating land, well-drained soil, and a humid or sub-humid tropical or sub-tropical climate. Indian tea plantation began in the 1840s in Assam's Brahmaputra valley, still the country's largest tract, accounting for about 53.2 per cent of the cropped area under tea and more than half of national production. The sub-Himalayan belt of West Bengal (Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar) and the lower slopes of the Nilgiri and Cardamom hills in the Western Ghats are the other major tracts. India is the world's second-largest tea producer, though its share of the export market has fallen over time.

Sugarcane is a tropical crop, rainfed where humid but mostly irrigated in India, concentrated in the Indo-Gangetic plain (Uttar Pradesh alone produces about two-fifths of the country's cane), with a second belt in Maharashtra and Gujarat and a third in irrigated Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Coffee, mostly the higher-quality arabica variety, is a Western Ghats plantation crop across Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, with Karnataka alone growing more than two-thirds of the national crop.

Micro-Irrigation: Closing the Water-Efficiency Gap

Irrigation still covers only about a third of India's cultivated area, so raising water-use efficiency on the land that is irrigated matters as much as extending canals. Since 2015-16, the government has run this push through Per Drop More Crop (PDMC), originally a component of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana and, from 2022-23, folded into the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana. PDMC funds drip and sprinkler systems at farm level: 55 per cent of the cost is covered for small and marginal farmers and 45 per cent for other farmers, with a further 25 per cent higher unit cost allowed for the North-Eastern and Himalayan states, and 15 per cent higher for states where micro-irrigation adoption is still low.

By 2023-24, PDMC had brought 83.46 lakh hectares under micro-irrigation since 2015-16. Karnataka leads all states with about 21.6 per cent of the national coverage, followed by Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, each between 11 and 13 per cent. A dedicated Micro Irrigation Fund with NABARD, initial corpus ₹5,000 crore, lets states borrow to expand coverage, with the Centre absorbing 3 per cent of the interest.

The Exam Trap: Categories That Look the Same but Aren't

UPSC tends to test the fine print of these classifications, not the headline numbers:

• Barren and wasteland cannot be cultivated with available technology (hilly terrain, deserts, ravines). Culturable wasteland is land left fallow for more than five years but can still be reclaimed, the opposite case.
• Current fallow is land rested for one agricultural year or less. Fallow other than current fallow is uncultivated for more than a year but less than five; beyond five years it becomes culturable wasteland.
• Net sown area is land sown and harvested at least once. Gross cropped area adds every extra sowing on the same land within the year, which is what makes cropping intensity a genuinely different number from 100 per cent.
• PDMC subsidy rates get flipped in statement-based questions: 55 per cent for small and marginal farmers, 45 per cent for other farmers, never the reverse.

Quick revision points

• India's cultivable land fell slightly, from 59.5 to 57.7 per cent of reporting area (1950-51 to 2019-20), so cropping intensity, not new land, is the main lever for more output.
• Seasons: kharif (June-September), rabi (October-March), zaid (April-June, irrigated); the south grows the same crop thrice a year given enough soil moisture.
• Cotton: three belts, Punjab-Haryana-northern Rajasthan, Gujarat-Maharashtra, and the Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka-Tamil Nadu plateaus; India ranks second in the world after China.
• Tea: Assam's Brahmaputra valley (about 53 per cent of cropped tea area), West Bengal's Darjeeling-Jalpaiguri-Cooch Behar belt, and the Nilgiri and Cardamom hills.
• PDMC/Per Drop More Crop: 83.46 lakh hectares under micro-irrigation since 2015-16; subsidy 55 per cent (small/marginal), 45 per cent (others); Karnataka leads state-wise coverage.

Once the land-use categories, the cropping calendar and the named cash-crop belts are fixed, practise the statement-based and matching-pairs questions UPSC builds around exactly this kind of specific, regional detail.