The paper has examined the inclusiveness of strategies for increasing farmers’ incomes in Telangana for the past two decades by using various government reports and statistical abstracts of the Telangana state. Telangana agricultural sector is in state of transition from cereals-based cropping systems to commercial crops-based cropping systems with larger contribution from fruits and vegetables and commercial crops like cotton and soybean. The commercialization of agriculture has resulted in high input-high output-high risk agriculture, wherein small and marginal farmers are not able to cope with and ultimately end up in huge debt with higher cost of production. Further, faster farm mechanization in the recent years has resulted in increased scale economies with small farmers getting less profit compared to large farmers per unit area. The tenant farmers are especially at risk in the event of yield loss or output price reduction, as they have to pay tenancy free of about 30 per cent of the average farm returns, even though their yields are lower than average. The remedy is livestock sector, whose contribution is equal to crop sector to gross state domestic product. If an average agricultural household has to cross the poverty line, it will have to have 4.41 hectares of land in Telangana.
Farmers’ income, inclusiveness, farm mechanization commercialization of agriculture, Telangana
