India grain policy, state by state
Rice and millet area, procurement, groundwater stress, and switching potential.
Interactive explorer of Indian state-level rice and millet production, procurement, and groundwater suitability, with drill-down to district level.
India's rice-versus-millet debate is usually framed as agronomy. It is actually procurement. States grow rice where the Food Corporation of India buys it at MSP, not where the soil, rainfall, or aquifer can carry it. This explorer shows, state by state, how much rice sits on land classified as unsuited for it — and what the switching ledger looks like if that rice moved to the millet best suited to the geography.
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5 states
Methodology & scope
- Rice suitability class (state-level): share-weighted aggregation of district classification, where each district is classified as unsuited if majority of its rice area falls on CGWB Over-Exploited or Critical blocks; marginal if Semi-Critical or canal-deficient; suited otherwise. A state's class is its dominant share.
- Tubewell share: from the 5th Minor Irrigation Census (2017–18), aggregated to district and then state using rice-area-weighted averages. A district that is 99% tubewell-irrigated (Punjab average) represents a textbook case of groundwater-financed paddy.
- Groundwater blocks: Central Ground Water Board Dynamic Ground Water Resources report, 2024 edition, block-level assessment. Four classes — Safe, Semi-Critical, Critical, Over-Exploited — based on the ratio of annual extraction to annual recharge.
- Procurement share of production: FCI + state agency procurement as a share of total production. Punjab sits near 90%; much of peninsular India procures less than 20% of what it grows.
- Switching ledger: at 20% of each state's unsuited rice area, computes water saved (at 2,800 L/kg gap), urea avoided (at ~150 kg/ha gap), and MSP outlay delta (at current rice MSP vs notional millet MSP at 2025–26 levels). The locally-appropriate millet is assigned per ICAR agro-climatic zonation — bajra for arid west, jowar for semi-arid Deccan, ragi for southern uplands.
- Millet type breakdown: ICRISAT apportioned district panel (1966 administrative boundaries), broken into jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millet), ragi (finger millet), and small millets (kodo, kutki, foxtail, little, barnyard, proso). Small millets are aggregated for card display; district drill-down preserves the split.
- What this explorer does not do: it does not model yield response under monsoon deficit by crop, it does not capture fodder value (bajra and jowar stover is a separate rural income line), and it does not price aquifer decline. The first two are next-asset material; the third is an ongoing debate in Indian water economics.
- Map boundary note: state and district polygons follow Datameet's India shapefiles (github.com/datameet/maps) — the officially correct Indian boundary representation including full J&K and Aksai Chin, which Natural Earth and similar international sources mis-render.