Yield Gaps in Major Crops of India: A Review of Drivers and Sustainable Intensification Pathways

Abstract

India faces large, persistent yield gaps across eight major crops—wheat, rice, maize, soybean, pulses, mustard, cotton, and sugarcane—that collectively limit food security and rural income. This review synthesises evidence from over 100 peer-reviewed studies (1990–2024) to provide the first comprehensive, multi-crop, agro-climatically resolved yield gap analysis for India. Applying the three-tier framework of potential yield (Yp), attainable yield (Ya), and farmer yield (Yf), exploitable yield gaps are quantified at national and agro-climatic zone level, ranked limiting factors are identified, and projected climate change impacts are assessed. Yield gaps range from 20 to 35% in irrigated rice of the north-western Indo-Gangetic Plain to 60–75% in rainfed cotton and pulses of the semi-arid tropics. Yield gaps of blackgram across 20 major districts average 515 kg ha−1, driven by moisture stress, biotic pressure, and management constraints. Nitrogen management, irrigation access, variety adoption, and sowing-date optimisation collectively explain 80–85% of exploitable gaps, while nitrogen and irrigation alone account for 40–58%. Closing 50% of exploitable yield gaps could add approximately 100 million tonnes of food grain annually without expanding cultivated area, directly supporting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2). However, climate change is projected to widen yield gaps of rainfed rice by 15–30% by the 2040s under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. Beyond this crop-by-crop synthesis, the review proposes a constraint-transition framework in which the dominant type of limiting factor shifts predictably from biophysical (water, climate) in the largest-gap rainfed systems to agronomic management (nitrogen, sowing date, variety) at intermediate gap levels and to institutional and socioeconomic constraints (credit, extension, land tenure, gender) as gaps narrow in the best-resourced irrigated systems, thus offering a conceptual lens for prioritising interventions by development stage rather than by crop alone.