What was the per hectare yield of Rice and Wheat in the year 2023-2024 in India ?

Question

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Correct — option (3), 2,882 kilograms per hectare for rice and 3,559 for wheat. These are the yield figures for 2023-24 in the Ministry of Agriculture's estimates, and they sit consistently with the production side of the same set of estimates, which put rice at 137.82 million tonnes and wheat at 113.29 million tonnes, both records at the time, within a total foodgrain output of 332.22 million tonnes. Yield is simply production divided by area, so the three numbers move together and a candidate who remembers any two can sanity-check the third. Now look at what can be reasoned rather than recalled. Every option pairs a smaller rice figure with a larger wheat figure, which reflects a real and durable fact — India's national wheat yield runs well above its rice yield, because wheat is concentrated in the irrigated north-west while rice is grown across an enormous range of conditions, including very large rainfed areas in the east where yields are low. Since all four options respect that ordering, it discriminates nothing, and the item turns entirely on magnitude. Here two options can be pushed out on scale alone. The figures in option (1), 3,282 and 4,559, are of the order of the best-performing states rather than of the national average, and no national rice yield of that size has been reported. The figures in option (4), 2,581 and 3,259, belong to an earlier stage of the trend; Indian yields have risen steadily and a figure of that size understates 2023-24. That leaves options (2) and (3) within a couple of hundred kilograms of each other, which is where precise recall becomes unavoidable — and it is the standard shape of a data question: two implausible values to be eliminated by judgment, and two plausible ones to be separated by memory.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Far too high for a national average on both counts. Yields of this order are what the best-performing states achieve — the irrigated tracts of Punjab and Haryana with assured water, high fertiliser use and short-duration varieties — and a national figure has to average those states together with the large rainfed rice areas of the east, where yields are a fraction of them. The check worth internalising is that a national average is always pulled down by the weakest regions, so any option that looks like a state-level best performance is almost certainly not a national number. Applying that test alone removes this option without recalling anything about 2023-24.  (b) The serious distractor, and the reason this question cannot be fully reasoned out. Both figures are of the right order for an Indian national average in the recent past — they respect the rice-below-wheat relationship and they are within the plausible band — and they are simply about two hundred kilograms per hectare short of the 2023-24 estimates for each crop. Numbers of this kind belong to the trend a few years earlier, and the gap matters because Indian yields have been rising steadily rather than fluctuating around a fixed level. Separating this option from the correct one requires the actual figures for the year named in the stem, which is exactly what the setter intended.  (d) Too low for 2023-24, and low enough to be eliminated by a candidate who knows the direction of the trend rather than the level. India's per-hectare yields in both crops have climbed through successive years on the back of irrigation expansion, better varieties and higher input use, and 2023-24 was a record year for both rice and wheat production — 137.82 and 113.29 million tonnes respectively. A record production year sitting on a yield figure lower than the recent trend would be internally inconsistent unless sown area had expanded sharply, which it had not. Reading the option against the production record is the check that disposes of it.

Concept: Yield, area and production are the three quantities every agricultural data question is built from, and they are locked together: production equals area multiplied by yield, so any two determine the third and a candidate who carries one pair can reconstruct the rest. For India's two principal foodgrains the structural picture is stable enough to be memorised as a shape rather than as a table. Wheat's national yield exceeds rice's, because wheat is grown in a compact and heavily irrigated north-western belt under a fairly uniform rabi regime, while rice is grown from Punjab to Kerala to Assam under conditions that include very large rainfed areas with low and uncertain yields. In absolute production, rice exceeds wheat, because rice occupies a much larger area. Uttar Pradesh is the largest wheat-producing state and West Bengal the largest rice-producing state, while Punjab and Haryana lead on yield in both crops — which is why national averages always look modest beside the numbers a candidate remembers from state-level reading. India ranks second in the world in both rice and wheat production, behind China. The official numbers come from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, which issues successive advance estimates through the year before publishing final estimates.

State PCS 2026 Q20 — Economy PYQ with Answer

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