Sunday, October 14, 2012

Food Grain availability in India

Problem Narrative

India in the second largest country in the world in terms of its population. This translates into feeding more mouths in India than anywhere else in the world. Hence the production of various food grains, which for a country that is mainly vegetarian, is one of the prime concerns. In-spite of the green revolution in India and the increase of food grain production; the overall per-capita availability of food grain has diminished over the years. One of the chief problems is the rising price of food and high population growth. Hence the poorer and more vulnerable sections of the society mainly feel the impact of the per-capita availability of food grains. Indians today are consuming far less protein than they used to. Pulses are one of the most important sources of protein for a mainly vegetarian diet. India is one of the largest producers and consumers of pulses in the world. However the per capita domestic production of pulses has dropped from 63 gms in 1970 to a very low 36 gms in 2008.

Behavior Over Time


As you can see from the above graphs, that even though the overall production of food grains has increased over the years, the high growth of population has led to overall decrease in the per-capita availability of various food grains.

Relevance of a Systems Perspective

Food grain availability is an ideal systems problem for analysis. There are multiple factors affecting the per-capita availability of food grains. Constant rising population translates into more mouths being fed everyday, limited availability of cultivable land, and increasing the yields from cultivable land are the various dynamic factors. Government’s basic concern of feeding poor people and increasing food grain production while developing more urban areas for the overall growth of the country are the competing goals at play.

Study Objective and Questions to be Addressed

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a minimum of 80 gms of pulses consumption per person per day for Indians for their daily dose of nutrition. The main purpose of this research is how to achieve these goals to meet the demand supply mismatch. According to the WHO recommendations and the expected growth of Indian population, India will need to produce substantially more food grains. The main concern is that since the availability of cultivable land is constant due to geographically restraints and on the contrary reducing due to development of urbanization and infrastructure. Hence India will either have to double its acreage at the current yield levels or will have to double the yield at the fixed acreage. Since both these alternatives are not feasible in isolation, a synergistic effect needs to take place where a combination of both is the eventual goal.

3 comments:

  1. The thing that really stood out to me was just that I didn't know what pulses were. If you just added a sentence about what they are, that would tie everything up. I think this is good! Definitely an interesting and very important topic.

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  2. Pulses are the edible dry seeds of leguminous plants. Pulses are important food crops due to their high protein. Just like "bean" and "lentil", the word "pulse" also refers to just the seed, rather than the entire plant.

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  3. I like the topic. I was confused about pulses too, but I read your comment, so maybe you want to talk about it a little in the problem narrative section. I would also add some questions to be addressed in the last section, along with the objective.

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