Assessment of Productivity and Monetary Losses Due to Water Erosion in Rainfed Crops Across Different States of India for Prioritization and Conservation Planning

Abstract

Estimated annual production losses from rainfed cereal, oilseed and pulse crops at state, zonal and national levels do not provide a comparative picture of the severity of losses in different areas and crops leading to decline in production on per-unit area basis. In this paper, productivity or per-unit area production losses have been estimated for the considered rainfed crops to identify the states/regions in the country where intensive conservation measures need to be adopted to bring erosion within permissible limits and to restore the productivity of these crops to their potential capacity. Further, productivity losses were valued at government minimum support prices of the study crops to compute the monetary losses in the major cereal, oilseed and pulse crops in the country. It was observed that productivity loss in rainfed cereals at state level ranges from 0.2–10.9 q/ha, for oilseeds 0.1–6.3 q/ha and for pulses 0.04–4.4 q/ha. These losses in the states having relatively smaller areas under these crops and are low ranked in terms of total production loss, such as northeastern states, Goa, Kerala and Uttarakhand, are 2–5 times higher than the national average and are placed in top 8–10 ranks of affected states, thus justifying the need to estimate productivity losses rather than the production losses. The northeastern states, though account for only 4 % of rainfed area under considered crops, are the leading states in terms of productivity losses. India as a whole suffers a loss of 1.63 q/ha in productivity of rainfed crops, which is valued at Rs. 2,484/ha. In absolute terms, the annual production losses are 13.4 Mt valued at Rs. 205.32 billion considering minimum support price of 2011/12. About 53 % of total monetary loss is accounted for by paddy, groundnut, soybean and maize crops due to water erosion.