Q.Describe the cropping pattern of Maharashtra and explain why its agriculture is described as highly vulnerable to the monsoon.

The state grows a wide mix of food and cash crops, but because much of its land is rain-fed, farming rises and falls with the monsoon.

Cropping pattern. Maharashtra grows a wide range of crops:

• Food crops: jowar (sorghum) and bajra (pearl millet) — well suited to its dry conditions — along with rice (in the wetter Konkan and east), wheat and pulses.
• Cash (commercial) crops: these are especially important — sugarcane (the base of the co-operative sugar industry, mainly in Western Maharashtra), cotton (the great crop of Vidarbha and Khandesh), and oilseeds.
• Horticulture: a large fruit-and-vegetable output — grapes (Nashik), oranges (Nagpur), bananas, pomegranates, Alphonso mango (Konkan) and onions.

Why it is monsoon-vulnerable.

1. A large rain-fed area. A big share of Maharashtra's cropped area is rain-fed, and only a relatively small share is irrigated — low compared with several other states.
2. A dry plateau geography. Much of the state lies on the Deccan plateau with erratic and uneven rainfall, so a weak or delayed monsoon directly reduces output.
3. Drought-prone interior. The rain-fed cotton and soybean tracts of Vidarbha and Marathwada are especially exposed to drought, and repeated crop failures there have caused severe agrarian distress. …

Naming only food crops and forgetting the state's important cash crops (sugarcane, cotton, oilseeds); explaining monsoon-vulnerability without linking …