Low productivity

The central problem in Indian agriculture is that the yield per hectare — the output from each unit of land — is far below what is achieved in other major agricultural countries. This is not a marginal difference; it is a persistent, structural weakness.

For the main food and cash crops, India’s per hectare output lags significantly behind countries like the USA, Russia, and Japan. This holds true for rice, wheat, cotton, and oilseeds. The gap is not small — it reflects deep differences in farming technology, input use, and irrigation.

The reason labour productivity is also very low is the extreme pressure on land. With a huge population dependent on farming, each piece of land has too many workers on it. More people work on a given area than is efficient, so the output per person remains low — even if total output from the field is moderate.

A major part of the problem lies in the vast rainfed areas of the country. These are regions that depend entirely on rainfall, with no irrigation. Within this category, the drylands are the worst affected. These areas mostly grow coarse cereals (like jowar, bajra, maize), pulses, and oilseeds — crops that are naturally less productive than irrigated rice or wheat. The yields in these dry regions are especially low. …