Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Sowing is down 1.5 per cent on last year, which sounds like nothing. Measured against what a normal year should look like, the picture is different — and the crop that is above normal is the thirstiest one India grows.
The Agriculture Ministry’s weekly sowing report, for area as on 21 August 2026, puts total kharif coverage at 1,056.70 lakh hectares against 1,072.77 lakh at the same point last year — a decline of 16.07 lakh hectares, or 1.50 per cent. That is the figure that will be reported, and on its own it is unalarming. The ministry publishes a second column, though, and almost nobody uses it: the normal area, which is 1,104.45 lakh hectares. Against normal, this year’s kharif stands at 95.7 per cent. The year-on-year comparison measures this season against last season. The normal comparison measures it against what the country’s land is expected to carry.
Run every major crop against normal and the distribution is uneven in a way the aggregate conceals. Ragi is at 40.0 per cent of its normal area — 4.81 lakh hectares against a normal of 12.01 lakh. Cotton is at 86.4 per cent, a shortfall of 17.06 lakh hectares against normal, even though its year-on-year change is a trivial −0.26 per cent. Urad is up a striking 12.25 per cent on last year and still sits at only 82.4 per cent of normal. Rice, whose 13.19 lakh hectare year-on-year fall has drawn most of the attention, is actually at 98.3 per cent of normal — the least worrying of the lot once the right yardstick is used.
The crops that lost ground. Ragi is sown on just 40 per cent of its normal area this kharif and cotton on 86 per cent, while sugarcane — the most water-hungry crop in the table — is sown on nearly 108 per cent of normal.
Compared with last year, the crop looks steady. Compared with normal, it is telling you which crops farmers have quietly stopped planting.
At a Glance
• Total sown, 21 Aug: 1,056.70 lakh ha — 95.7% of the 1,104.45 lakh normal
• Year on year: down 16.07 lakh ha, or 1.50%
• Ragi: 40.0% of normal — the sharpest gap in the table
• Cotton: 86.4% of normal, a 17.06 lakh ha shortfall
• Sugarcane: 107.8% of normal — the only major crop above it
• Rice: 98.3% of normal, despite a 13.19 lakh ha fall on last year
• Pulses: up 1.49 lakh ha, with Uttar Pradesh alone adding 3.97 lakh
• Maize: 110.8% of normal but down 4.06% on last year
Now set that against water. Sugarcane is the only major crop planted above its normal area — 58.44 lakh hectares against a normal of 54.20 lakh, or 107.8 per cent — and sugarcane is the most water-intensive crop in the table by a wide margin. Ragi, at the other end, is among the least thirsty and among the most nutritious, and it has lost three-fifths of its normal footprint. This is not a monsoon story; it is a price and procurement story. Farmers plant what has an assured buyer at an assured price, and cane has both through the fair and remunerative price and the mill’s statutory obligation to crush. Millets have neither at comparable strength, notwithstanding the branding of Shree Anna.
The constructive path is well mapped and only partly walked. Where crop-diversification incentives have been paid to the farmer for the switch rather than merely permitting it — Haryana’s paddy-to-alternatives payments are the cleanest domestic example — the acreage has moved. Extending assured procurement and a working market for millets and pulses in the districts where the aquifer is falling fastest would move it further; Uttar Pradesh adding 3.97 lakh hectares of pulses in a single season shows how quickly area responds when the incentive is right. The final sowing figures are still weeks away and the season can yet close the gap. But the column to watch when they arrive is not the one comparing this year with last. It is the one comparing this year with normal, and asking why the thirstiest crop is the only one above the line.
