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High Frequency Indicators · Agriculture · Ministry of Agriculture

India's Harvest

Since 1968 India has gone from feeding itself on the brink to a foodgrain surplus — and it did it almost entirely on the same land. Pick a crop and see it three ways: how much was grown, how much land it took, and the yield squeezed from each hectare. Flip from foodgrains to the commercial crops — sugarcane, cotton, tea, coffee — to see where the cash economy grew.

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PolityPolicy.com
by Tushar Gupta · India, in Numbers — No Rhetoric, Just Data
Source: Reserve Bank of India, Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy — Tables 17 & 19 (foodgrains: production in lakh tonnes, area in lakh hectares) and Tables 18 & 20 (commercial crops: production & area); underlying data from the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Yield is production ÷ area. Commercial-crop units differ by crop — sugarcane, oilseeds & tobacco in tonnes; cotton & jute in 170/180-kg bales; tea & coffee in kilograms — so the indexed view is the fair cross-crop comparison. 1968-69 to 2024-25; 2024-25 figures are advance estimates. A dash means the series had not begun. Retrieved July 2026.
High Frequency Indicators · India, in Numbers
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