Wheat

Detail

Place in Indian agriculture

• Wheat is India's second most important cereal, after rice.
• It is the main food crop of the north and north-west of India.
• It is a temperate crop, which means it grows best in cool weather, like the weather of the mid-latitudes.
• It is a rabi crop. Rabi crops are sown in winter (October–December) and harvested in spring or early summer (April–June).
• It covers about 14% of India's cropped area (NCERT).

Growing conditions

Factor	Need	Why it matters
Temperature	A cool growing season	The plant grows leaves and tillers (side shoots) best in cool weather.
Sunshine	Bright sunshine at ripening	Warm, dry and sunny days in March–April help the grain to ripen and dry.
Rainfall	50–75 cm, spread evenly over the growing season	Wheat needs moderate water. Too much rain at harvest spoils the grain.
Winter rain	From western disturbances	Gives light rain when the crop is growing.
Water supply	Mostly irrigated	Rainfed only in the Himalayan highlands and parts of Malwa

• Western disturbances are low-pressure storms that start over the Mediterranean region and move east across West Asia into north-west India in winter.
• They bring light winter rain to Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
• They bring snow to the Himalayas.
• The winter rain is a free extra watering for the rabi wheat crop. It is most useful where there is no irrigation.

Main wheat zones

• Two main zones (NCERT Class 10): 1. The Ganga–Satluj plains in the north-west, covering Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and north Rajasthan. 2. The black soil region of the Deccan, mainly in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Black soil (regur) holds moisture well, so wheat can grow on stored soil water.

• About 85% of the wheat area lies in three regions (NCERT Class 12):

• the Indo-Gangetic plain
• the Malwa plateau, in western Madhya Pradesh
• the Himalayas, up to 2,700 m in height. Above this height, the season is too cold and too short for the crop to ripen.

Leading states and yields

• Leading states: Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Class 10 also lists Bihar.
• Yield means the amount of grain produced on one hectare of land.

Yield level	States	Reason
Very high (above 4,000 kg/ha)	Punjab, Haryana	Assured canal and tube-well irrigation, high-yielding seeds, fertiliser use, and Green Revolution core areas
Moderate	Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar	Irrigation is only partial, farms are smaller and less inputs are used
Low	Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir	Large rainfed areas and hill farming

• Madhya Pradesh is known for:
• Sharbati, a premium bread wheat of the Malwa region
• durum wheat, a hard wheat used for semolina (sooji) and pasta

Current production

• 2024-25: wheat output was about 117.94 million tonnes. This was a record and about 4.2 million tonnes more than 2023-24 [2][3].
• 2025-26 (Third Advance Estimates): about 120.66 million tonnes. This is about 2.71 million tonnes more than 2024-25 [4].
• Area, Rabi 2026: wheat was sown on about 334.17 lakh hectares (about 33.4 million ha), up from 328.04 lakh ha the year before. Early and timely sowing helped the increase [5].

World position

• India is the world's second-largest wheat producer, after China (2024-25) [3].
• NCERT gives India's share of world output as 12.8% (2017).

Wheat and the Green Revolution

• Green Revolution (from the mid-1960s) means the use of high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, irrigation and chemical fertilisers to raise food output quickly.
• New HYV wheat seeds did best on irrigated land in Punjab, Haryana and north Rajasthan.
• Farmers there earned more from wheat than from gram, a rainfed rabi pulse.
• As a result, wheat displaced gram in these areas. Gram moved to the rainfed lands of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

Terminal heat stress and the 2022 shock

• Terminal heat stress means very high heat during grain-filling, the last stage of growth, when starch moves into the grain.
• Grain-filling happens in March–April in north-west India.
• If temperatures rise early, the crop is forced to mature too soon.

• The result is shrivelled, lighter grains and lower yield.

• What happened in 2022:

• An early summer and an untimely heatwave in March 2022 cut wheat yields, especially in Punjab and Haryana [6].
• To help those farmers, the government raised the allowed limit of shrivelled grains in procurement from 6% to 18% [6].
• Wheat exports were restricted from 13 May 2022. The aim was to stop speculative trading and cool down domestic wheat and atta prices [6].

Heat-tolerant varieties

• ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and state agricultural universities have bred many varieties that can tolerate terminal heat [7].
• In 2021-22, DBW187 and DBW222 gave 3.6% and 5.4% more yield than the older variety HD-3086 under heat [7].

• Heat-tolerant varieties now cover more than 50% of the wheat area, mostly in the North Western Plain Zone (as reported in 2022) [7].

• In 2025-26, farmers replaced old seeds with new climate-resilient and disease-resistant varieties more often. This higher varietal replacement rate (how often farmers switch to new varieties) helped the crop withstand heat. No pest or disease outbreak was reported that season [4][5].

Zero-till wheat after rice

• In the rice–wheat cropping system of the Indo-Gangetic plain, wheat is sown right after the kharif rice harvest.
• Zero tillage means sowing wheat seed directly into the unploughed rice field with a special seed drill.
• The farmer saves the days that ploughing would take, so wheat is sown earlier.
• Earlier sowing means grain-filling ends before the March–April heat.

• The rice stubble does not need to be burnt, which reduces stubble-burning smog.

• Resource-conserving methods such as zero tillage give high wheat yields and cut farmers' costs by about 20% [8].

• In north-west India, nearly 50% of farm households have adopted such methods. The zero-till seed drill became the most common farm machine after the tractor [8].

Map exercise (NCERT)

• On an outline map of India, mark:
• the Punjab–Haryana–western Uttar Pradesh plain
• north Rajasthan (the Ganganagar canal area)
• the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh
• the black soil belt of Maharashtra
• Bihar
• the Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir

Prelims Hooks

• Wheat is a rabi and temperate crop. It needs 50–75 cm of evenly spread rain and bright sunshine at ripening.
• Wheat's winter rain comes from western disturbances, which start over the Mediterranean. It does not come from the north-east monsoon.
• The upper limit of wheat farming in the Himalayas is about 2,700 m.
• About 85% of the wheat area lies in the Indo-Gangetic plain + Malwa plateau + Himalayas.
• Yields above 4,000 kg/ha are found in Punjab and Haryana. They are not found in Madhya Pradesh, even though it is a leading producer.
• Wheat is rainfed in the Himalayan highlands and parts of Malwa. It is irrigated almost everywhere else.
• India is the second-largest wheat producer after China. India produced about 117.94 MT in 2024-25 and about 120.66 MT in 2025-26 (Third Advance Estimates) [3][4].
• DBW187 and DBW222 are heat-tolerant wheat varieties bred by ICAR [7].
• Terminal heat stress hits wheat at the grain-filling stage, in March–April.
• Wheat exports were restricted from 13 May 2022, after the March 2022 heatwave [6].

Mains Points

• Distribution pattern (GS-I):
• Wheat is concentrated in the north-west because of four things: cool winters, winter rain from western disturbances, fertile alluvial soil, and dense canal and tube-well irrigation.
• The Deccan black soil belt is a second zone. There, wheat grows on moisture stored in the soil.

• The yield gap between irrigated Punjab–Haryana and rainfed Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir shows how much yield depends on irrigation.

• Climate risk (GS-III):

• A warmer March can shorten grain-filling.
• The 2022 heatwave cut yields in Punjab and Haryana. It led to export curbs and to relaxed procurement norms for shrivelled grain [6].

• Climate change makes such heat shocks more likely.

• Adaptation (GS-III):

• Heat-tolerant varieties now cover more than half of the North Western Plain Zone [7].

• Faster varietal replacement [4] and zero-till early sowing [8] help the crop finish grain-filling before the heat. Zero tillage also cuts stubble burning and costs.

• Sustainability (GS-III):

• The Green Revolution rice–wheat system pushed out gram (a pulse) from Punjab, Haryana and north Rajasthan. This hurt crop diversity and pulse self-sufficiency.
• The system also draws heavily on groundwater. This makes diversification an important policy issue.