Agriculture in India: Progress, Challenges, and Reforms

India feeds more than 1.4 billion people every day, and it does this largely with its own soil, seeds, and labour. The country is also a major exporter, shipping rice, sugar, spices, and cotton across the globe. Yet the same sector that makes India a food powerhouse also carries some of its deepest economic distress, from tiny landholdings to debt-ridden farmers. Understanding how Indian agriculture reached this point, and why it still struggles despite its scale, tells us a lot about the country’s development story itself.

India’s standing as an agricultural powerhouse 🔗

Agriculture is not a marginal activity in India. It remains the primary livelihood for roughly 55 percent of the country’s workforce, even though its share of GDP has shrunk over the decades as services and industry have grown. That scale alone makes it a sector no development plan can ignore, and agriculture continues to anchor rural employment and food security across the country.

The numbers back this up. India is currently the second-largest producer of both rice and wheat in the world, and it leads global output in pulses and millets. According to government estimates, the country produced over 150 million tonnes of rice and close to 118 million tonnes of wheat in the 2024-25 agricultural year, alongside record pulse and millet harvests. India also holds the top global position in milk production, a distinction it has kept since 1998, and it dominates dry onion output, contributing roughly a quarter of the world’s supply.

This scale keeps growing. The government’s most recent estimates put total foodgrain production for 2025-26 at over 376 million tonnes, which officials describe as the highest foodgrain output the country has ever recorded, helped by new crop varieties and expanded farmer outreach programmes. That is a striking jump from the 204.6 million tonnes India produced back in 2004-05, and it reflects decades of policy effort layered on top of natural resource advantages like the country’s vast arable land area, the second largest in the world.

Key developments that shaped modern Indian agriculture 🔗

India’s current standing did not happen by accident. It is the result of a sequence of reforms and technological shifts stretching back to independence.

Land reforms after independence 🔗

When India became independent in 1947, most farmland was controlled by zamindars and intermediaries, while the people actually cultivating the land had few rights over it. The early decades after independence saw a push to abolish this intermediary system, cap the size of landholdings, and register tenant farmers as owners. These reforms were uneven across states, but where they worked, the effect was significant. Research on this period notes that tenancy rates fell from around 60 percent to 25 percent within a decade of independence, while the share of farmers owning mid-sized plots rose sharply. This created a rural base of landowning cultivators who had both the incentive and the security to invest in improving their farms, setting the stage for what followed.

The green revolution 🔗

By the mid-1960s, India was in a genuine food crisis. Two consecutive droughts, a fast-growing population, and heavy reliance on imported grain pushed the country close to famine conditions. The response was the Green Revolution, built around high-yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilisers, expanded irrigation, and government-backed minimum support prices to make farming commercially attractive. High-yielding varieties of wheat, developed with inputs from agronomist Norman Borlaug’s work and adapted for India by scientist M.S. Swaminathan, drove much of the early gains.

The results were dramatic in the regions where irrigation and infrastructure already existed. Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh became the centre of this transformation, and by 1970, Punjab alone was producing around 70 percent of India’s total food grains, with farmer incomes in the state rising sharply. Within about a decade, India moved from being a food-deficient country dependent on imports to one capable of feeding itself.

Modernisation beyond the green revolution 🔗

Agricultural policy did not stop evolving after the 1970s. Irrigation infrastructure expanded through large dam projects and later through micro-irrigation schemes. Minimum Support Price mechanisms were extended to more crops, giving farmers a income floor. More recently, government programmes have pushed agritech adoption, satellite-based crop monitoring, and organic farming initiatives such as the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana. India’s smart agriculture market itself is now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars and is expected to keep growing, showing how technology is gradually becoming part of the modernisation story, even if adoption remains patchy across the country.

The challenges that still hold Indian agriculture back 🔗

Despite record output and global rankings, the sector remains fragile in ways that show up most clearly at the level of the individual farmer.

Low productivity and fragmented landholdings 🔗

India’s average yields per hectare for many crops still lag behind global leaders. A major reason is the size of landholdings. Decades of inheritance-based land division have left most farmers with small and scattered plots, which limits economies of scale, discourages mechanisation, and pushes up transaction costs at every stage of farming. A recent academic review notes that small and fragmented landholdings, heavy dependence on monsoon rainfall, and weak post-harvest infrastructure remain among the most persistent structural barriers facing Indian farmers. Add to this the continued use of low-quality seeds by many smallholders, and it becomes clear why productivity gains have not matched the scale of India’s cultivated area.

Regional imbalances 🔗

Indian agriculture’s gains have never been evenly spread. The states that benefited most from the Green Revolution, Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh, pulled far ahead of regions like eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and the north-eastern states, where irrigation, credit access, and infrastructure lagged. This gap has proved difficult to close. Even today, mechanisation levels illustrate the divide sharply: India’s overall farm mechanisation stands at a fraction of levels seen in countries like China and Brazil, which have adopted mechanisation far more extensively. Within India itself, states such as Punjab and Haryana report much higher mechanisation than hilly and north-eastern regions, where rates remain negligible. This regional unevenness means national averages often mask very different realities on the ground.

Inadequate mechanization 🔗

Mechanisation deserves attention on its own, since it touches almost every other problem in the sector. Large parts of Indian farming are still done manually or with basic tools, which caps how much a single farmer can cultivate and limits efficiency gains from other inputs like seeds and fertiliser. Government schemes have tried to close this gap through subsidies for farm equipment, particularly in under-mechanised regions, but fragmented landholdings make it hard for individual farmers to justify buying expensive machinery. Custom hiring centres and farmer cooperatives have emerged as partial solutions, allowing groups of farmers to share equipment costs, though their reach is still limited.

Climate risk, credit, and market access 🔗

Roughly half of India’s cultivated land still depends on rainfall rather than assured irrigation, which makes output vulnerable to erratic monsoons, droughts, and floods, a risk that climate change is intensifying. On top of this, many farmers rely on informal moneylenders for credit at high interest rates, since access to institutional loans remains uneven. Weak market linkages compound the problem: without reliable storage, transport, and price information, farmers often sell to middlemen at low prices during a glut, only to see prices rise later when they have nothing left to sell. Addressing these overlapping issues, rather than any single one in isolation, is what most current policy conversations around agricultural reform are trying to tackle.

What do you think? Given how uneven the benefits of the Green Revolution turned out to be, can technology and mechanisation alone close the gap between India’s most and least developed farming regions, or does that require deeper reform first? And with climate change adding new pressure on rain-fed farmland, should India’s next big agricultural push prioritise irrigation and water management over further productivity gains?

References

1. https://www.ibef.org/industry/agriculture-india
2. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2248987&reg=3&lang=2
3. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2265965&reg=3&lang=1
4. https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-14-summer-2021/growing-democracy-india-farmer
5. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/green-revolution-in-india/
6. https://ijsret.com/2026/02/10/challenges-in-indian-agriculture-and-government-interventions-a-review/
7. https://www.sanskritiias.com/current-affairs/indian-agriculture-sector-challenges-reforms-and-the-road-ahead