How Punjab Helped India Dethrone China in Rice Production

India’s emergence as the world’s largest rice producer, edging past China in the 2024–25 agricultural year, signals a quiet but consequential shift in Asian agriculture and global food markets. With output projected at around 147–149 million tonnes against China’s roughly 145 million tonnes, India has converted its long-standing export dominance into outright leadership in total production. This transition is not the result of a single bumper harvest but reflects a deeper structural change: expanded acreage and productivity gains across multiple states, backed by public policy, technology and resilient farmer responses to climate variability.​

Several forces have propelled India past China in this arena. Above-normal or well-distributed monsoon rains in key rice belts over recent seasons have supported better sowing and yield outcomes, particularly in eastern and central India. Minimum support prices for paddy, combined with public procurement and input subsidies, have maintained farmer incentives to stay with rice despite rising costs and environmental stress. At the same time, the spread of high-yielding and hybrid varieties, improved agronomic practices, and greater mechanisation have steadily pushed up productivity in states such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, adding millions of tonnes to the national basket. China, meanwhile, has seen relative stagnation in rice area as urbanisation, labour shifts and crop diversification have constrained the expansion of paddy land, leaving yield improvements alone insufficient to maintain its earlier lead.​

Within this national story of ascent, Punjab’s role remains both emblematic and contested. The state’s modern agricultural identity was forged during the Green Revolution, when irrigation expansion, fertiliser use and high-yielding seeds turned it into one of India’s core grain bowls. Rice, which once had a modest footprint in Punjab, expanded sharply under the protective umbrella of assured procurement by the Food Corporation of India and an MSP regime that guaranteed farmers a ready buyer. By 2023, Punjab’s rice production had climbed to nearly 13 million tonnes annually, up from just over 3.2 million tonnes in the early 1980s, backed by some of the highest yield levels in the country. Such volumes feed not only local consumption but the central pool that underpins the Public Distribution System, ensuring that grain grown in Punjab is cooked on plates from Rajasthan to Assam.​

Yet Punjab’s contribution to India’s new rice supremacy comes with a complex ecological and policy baggage. The state’s paddy–wheat rotation, while remarkably productive, has imposed mounting pressure on groundwater, with falling water tables and energy-intensive pumping now central concerns for both state and Union governments. The intensive use of fertilisers and the widespread practice of stubble burning after the rice harvest have created serious soil and air quality challenges, turning agriculture into a political as well as environmental flashpoint each winter. Policymakers are increasingly trying to square the circle: preserving Punjab’s role as a high-surplus grain producer while nudging farmers towards crop diversification into maize, pulses and horticulture, and encouraging water-saving technologies such as direct-seeded rice.​

The long-term test for India’s rice leadership will lie in reconciling production ambition with sustainability, and Punjab sits at the heart of that dilemma. If the state can gradually shift its crop mix, improve water-use efficiency and adopt climate-resilient practices without a dramatic collapse in paddy output, it could script a second agricultural transformation as significant as the Green Revolution. In that scenario, Punjab would remain an essential anchor of India’s status as the world’s top rice producer, while also becoming a laboratory for how to secure food grains in an era of climate stress and resource scarcity.

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