Farm diversification status - an analysis

India is a country of about one billion people. More than 70 percent of India''s population lives in rural areas where the main occupation is agriculture. Indian agriculture is characterized by small farm holdings. The average farm size is only 1.57 hectares. Around 93 percent of farmers have land holdings smaller than 4 ha and they cultivate nearly 55 percent of the arable land. On the other hand only 1.6 percent of the farmers have operational land holdings above 10 ha and they contribute 17.4 percent of the total cultivated land. Due to the challenge of feeding our vast population and the experience of food shortages in the pre-independence era ''self - reliance'' in food grains has been the corner stone of our policies in the last 50 years.