India is basically an agriculture country and substantially affects the overall economic growth and socioeconomic condition of people. Any policy/programme for rural development in isolation without adequate focus on ensuring adequate foodgrain production will have limited success. During last four to five decades, especially after the mid sixties, growth in agriculture sector, especially foodgrains was quite impressive but could not sustain for longer period and now during last two decades it has remained stagnant. Despite enough opportunities for growth of foodgrains it is constrained by various factors such as lack of improved and certified seeds, availability and excessive use of nitrogenous fertilisres leading to imbalance in use of required nutrients, access to adequate amount of credit in time and more importantly the remunerative prices supported by policy intervention, etc. Since population growth is still quite high, growth in foodgrain production will be necessary for ensuring food as well as nutritional security. Though a part of cultivated land needs to be diverted for non food crops for higher income but care has to be taken that this might not adversely affect the foodgrain production. Besides, there is a need to formulate comprehensive state level agricultural policies to have balanced growth of foodgrain and non foodgrain crops without further accentuating the regional disparities.
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