Is India Moving Away from Coarse Cereals? Examining Evidence from Trends in Rice, Wheat and Coarse Cereals

Abstract

India’s agricultural production of cereals since the 1950s mainly comprises of rice, wheat and coarse cereals. Data shows that coarse cereals despite having maximum area under cultivation post independence and a high growth rate of production, have registered a declining trend in the recent decades. With global warming becoming a threat to monsoon- dependent grains like rice and wheat, India needs to start focusing more on coarse cereals. They are not only climate resilient using one-third the amount of water as compared to rice and wheat, but are also nutritionally superior to these grains. Data analysis for top five rice, wheat and coarse cereal producing states show that the decadal growth rates and yield per hectare have been declining for rice and wheat. Detailed inter-state comparisons are done to evaluate various aspects of these foodgrains. Finally, a fixed effects regression model is estimated to analyze the effect of area, annual rainfall, fertilizer consumption and MSP on the productivity of coarse and fine cereals, results show coarse cereals to be less dependent on rainfall and fertilizer use.