Instability and Regional Variation in Indian Agriculture

Indian agriculture is known for wide year-to-year fluctuations in crop output, crop yield, crop intensity and input use across regions of the country. The temporal instability and spatial variation result from a number of factors some of which are in the realm of policy, institutions and technology evolution. Therefore, different set of policies, technologies and institutions need to be used to manage instability and spatial variations in agriculture. Since the factors affecting instability have undergone changes over time, a need has been felt to update and compare instability during various phases of technology and policy. Besides instability, the regional variations assume significant importance in a country like India due to their size and agro-diversity. It is being felt for a long time that modifications in technologies and formulation of some government policies have uneven effect across various regions which is a major cause for the persistence of regional disparities in agriculture and farm-income. To address this issue there is a need to have reliable estimates of agricultural productivity for recent years at district level for the whole country so as to provide support to the planning of appropriate strategies for the development of low productivity regions of the country. In this connection, this paper provides the recent estimates of district level agricultural productivity which are important because several new districts have been created in the recent years in some states of the country.