Which of the following is a Kharif crop?

Question

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Correct — A, Sugarcane. India's cropping calendar is defined by WHEN a crop is sown and harvested, not by what family it belongs to. Kharif crops go into the ground with the onset of the south-west monsoon in June and July and are harvested in September and October — kharif is the Arabic word for autumn. Rabi crops are sown from October to December once the monsoon has withdrawn and are harvested between April and June — rabi is Arabic for spring. Zaid is the short irrigated summer season squeezed between the rabi harvest and the next kharif sowing. Judged on that calendar, sugarcane is the only crop on this list that belongs to the monsoon season: the Commission's remark classes it as sown at the beginning of the monsoon, and it wants exactly what the monsoon supplies, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 millimetres of water and temperatures of about 21 to 27 degrees Celsius. The Commission's own published remark on this question says precisely that — barley, gram and wheat are rabi crops, while sugarcane is a kharif crop since it is sown at the beginning of the monsoon and harvested in autumn. One honest qualification belongs in any serious answer, because it is what separates a student who has memorised a list from one who understands the calendar. Sugarcane is not a clean kharif crop in the way paddy or bajra is. It is a long-duration annual that stands ten to eighteen months in the field, so a single planting runs through a kharif season, a whole rabi season and often into the next kharif, and it is usually ratooned, the cut stubble being allowed to sprout again for a second and third harvest. Several standard texts therefore list sugarcane on its own rather than under kharif. The Commission has settled that ambiguity by applying the sowing-date test, and on that test sugarcane is classified with the kharif crops. In any case the elimination is airtight from the other direction: whatever label a textbook attaches to sugarcane, wheat, barley and gram are unambiguously rabi, so only option (a) can be the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is a rabi cereal, sown from October to December and harvested in March and April. It is the hardiest of the rabi cereals, tolerating poorer soils, higher salinity and less water than wheat, which is why it survives on the drier margins of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab, and it is grown mainly for malt, animal feed and sattu. Nothing about it is monsoon-sown; it is chosen only by candidates who confuse it with a coarse millet like bajra, which genuinely is kharif.  (c) Gram or chana (Cicer arietinum) is the classic rabi pulse and India's largest single pulse crop by output, sown in October and November on the moisture the monsoon has left in the soil and harvested from February to April; it needs a cool growing period and warm dry weather at ripening. This is the most instructive wrong option, because it punishes reasoning by crop family: most Indian pulses — arhar, moong, urad — are indeed kharif, so 'pulse means kharif' feels safe. Gram is exactly the exception that the season-based classification exists to capture.  (d) Wheat is the definitive rabi crop and the reference point against which the whole rabi season is taught — sown in November and December, harvested in March and April, needing a cool moist growing period, bright warm sunshine at ripening and about 50 to 75 centimetres of water from rain or irrigation. It was the crop on which the Green Revolution was built from 1966-67 with dwarf high-yielding varieties. A candidate who marks wheat has not misremembered one crop; they have inverted the two seasons entirely.

Concept: India's three cropping seasons exist because the rainfall does. The south-west monsoon between June and September delivers the large majority of the country's annual rain, so the agricultural year is organised around its arrival and withdrawal rather than around the calendar year. Kharif is the monsoon crop: sown as the rains break in June and July, largely rain-fed, moisture-loving, harvested in September and October. It carries rice, maize, jowar, bajra, ragi, arhar, moong, urad, cotton, jute, groundnut, soyabean and sugarcane. Rabi is the winter crop: sown from October to December once the monsoon has retreated, living on residual soil moisture, irrigation and the modest winter rain that western disturbances bring to the north-west, and harvested from April to June. It carries wheat, barley, gram, peas, mustard and linseed. Zaid is the short summer season between the two, entirely dependent on irrigation, and grows watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, vegetables and fodder. The essential point, and the one this question tests, is that the classification is agronomic rather than botanical. It says nothing about whether a plant is a cereal, a pulse, a fibre or a grass; it says only when the seed goes into the soil. That is also why the same species can change season with latitude and irrigation — rice is grown as a rabi crop in parts of coastal Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, and black gram is cultivated in both kharif and rabi.

State PCS 2025 Q145 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q145 — Economy PYQ with Answer