Answer:

Multiplicity of cropping systems has been one of the main features of Indian agriculture. This may be attributed to following two major factors:

♤ Rainfed agriculture still accounts for over 92.8 million hectare or 65 per cent of cropped area. A large diversity of cropping systems exists under rainfed and dryland areas with an overriding practice of intercropping, due to greater risks involved in cultivating larger area under a particular crop.

♤ Due to prevailing socio-economic situations such as dependency of large population on agriculture, small land-holding size, very high population pressure on land resource etc., improving household food security has been an issue of supreme importance to many million farmers of India, who constitute 56.15 million marginal (<1.0 hectare), 17.92 million small (1.0-2.0 hectare) and 13.25 million semi-medium (2.0-4.0 hectare) farm holdings, making together 90 per cent of 97.15 million operational holdings. An important consequence of this has been that crop production in India remained to be considered, by and large, a subsistence rather than commercial activity. One of the typical characteristics of subsistence farming is that most of the farmers resort to grow a number of crops on their farm holdings, primarily to fulfil their household needs and follow the practice of rotating a particular crop combination over a period of 3-4 years interchangeably on different farm fields.

Depending upon the natural water resources, each region has certain area under irrigated agriculture. But, broadly considering, two distinct irrigated ecosystems emerge. One is Indo-Gangetic Plain region comprising the states of Punjab, Haryana, plains of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and plains of Jammu & Kashmir. The other ecosystem may be carved out of coastal areas of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Under influence of all above factors, cropping systems remain dynamic in time and space, making it difficult to precisely determine their spread using conventional methods, over a large territory. Based on rationale of spread of crops in each district in the country, 30 important cropping systems have been identified. Some of them are rice-wheat, rice-rice, rice-gram, rice-mustard, rice- groundnut, rice-sorghum, pearl millet-gram, pearl millet-mustard, pearl millet-sorghum, and cotton-wheat.