In 1987, field crops were planted on about 45 % of the total land mass of India. Of this cultivated land, almost 37 million hectares were double-cropped, making the gross sown area equivalent to almost 173 million hectares. About 15 million hectares were permanent grazing land or were planted in various tree crops and groves. around 108 million hectares were either developed for nonagricultural uses, forested, or unsuited for agriculture because of topography. About 29.6 million hectares of the remaining land were classified as cultivable but fallow, and 15.6 million hectares were classified as cultivable wasteland. Expansion in crop production, therefore, has to come almost entirely from increasing yields on lands already in some kind of agricultural use.

Topography, soils, rainfall, and the availability of water for irrigation have been major determinants of the crop and farm animal patterns characteristic of the three major geographic regions of India--the Himalayas, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the Peninsula--and their agro-ecological subregions. Government policy as regards irrigation, the introduction of new crops, research and education, and incentives has had some impact on changing the orthodox crop and farm animal patterns in these subregions. The monsoons, play a critical role in determining whether the harvest will be bountiful, average, or poor in any given year. One of the objectives of government policy in the early 1990s was to find methods of reducing this dependence on the monsoons.