D A Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar
Online published on 5 December, 2018.
In the face of many recent protests by farmers emphasizing agrarian stress, this paper attempts to verify whether the profitability has been indeed declining in agriculture. Two important crops for India, cotton (a commercial crop) and wheat (foodgrain) are selected. This paper analyzes trends in area, production, yield, cost of cultivation and prices from the secondary data. Field level insights were gathered by holding discussions with farmers from Rajkot and Sabarkantha. The calculations reveal that while area under cotton and wheat in Gujarat is increasing, the profitability of both has been decreasing over time.
