Expansion of Indian Agriculture with limited factors of production

There are four factors, including land, water, labor, and energy, that play crucial roles in producing more in agriculture. To produce crops, farmers use these inputs. The output grown by them is determined by the input they use at a given level of technology.

In the pre-green revolution era, the quantity and quality of land were the primary factors limiting agricultural output. As per the NITI Aayog article, Jaspal Singh and Ramesh Chand stated that India’s farm sector grew by 2.8% annually on average from 1950–51 to 1961–62. Over this period, the country’s net sown area increased from 118.75 lakh to 135.40 lakh hectares.

Water availability and soil fertility impact the quality of agricultural land. The richest soils are found in the Indo-Gangetic plains and the Krishna, Kaveri, Mahanadi, and Godavari deltas of the eastern coast. The soils that are best for growing black cotton are found in Malwa, Saurashtra, and the Deccan plateaus.

Water availability is dependent on rainfall and the availability of irrigation sources such as lakes, tanks, rivers, and ponds. In traditional agriculture, the more produce was harvested, the more farmhands and bullocks were to work the land in terms of labor and energy. The main energy source in farms was bullock before the invention of harvesters, tractors, threshers, and tubewells powered by electric or diesel engines.

The efficient utilization of factors of production is made possible by factors of technology. The four factors of technology are crop protection, genetics, agronomic interventions, and crop nutrition. The subject of genetics is plant breeding and seeds. There would have been no Green Revolution without high-yielding wheat and rice varieties created by Henry Beachell, Norman Borlaug, Gurdev Singh Khush, and other scientists. These varieties consist of dwarfing genes that cause the plants to grow shorter.

Earlier, farmers reared cattle not just for their milk and draft force but also for their excreta, which contained the minerals needed for plant growth.

For various time periods, Singh and Chand have estimated the trend growth rates in gross value added from agriculture and other related activities, each of which they have represented as “turning points towards either acceleration or deceleration.”

The highest annual growth rate among all the phases during the period from 2005–06 to 2021–22 was 3.7%.