Agricultural Regionalisation: definition and methods – UPSC

• Agricultural regionalisation is the sorting of a country into territorial units that are alike in their farming, so that a very mixed farm landscape can be read region by region.
• It is more than a mapping exercise. Each boundary drawn is also a way of understanding why the farm pattern takes the shape it does.
• India lends itself to this study, because its range of terrain, climate and society produces many distinct kinds of agriculture within one country.

Region and Agricultural Region

The Idea of a Region

• Region is a basic concept of geography, defined in several ways. The widely used definition is an area set apart from other areas by stated criteria.
  • If the crop is the criterion, a tea-growing region stands apart from a wheat-growing region.
• Derwent Whittlesey (1929) described a region as a differentiated segment of the earth’s surface.
• Regionalisation is the process that divides an area into territorial units, each a complex of uniformities produced by a set of processes. It has drawn wide attention in agricultural geography.

What an Agricultural Region Is

• An agricultural region is an area showing sameness in farm land use and cropping pattern.
  • It is identified from crops, livestock and the ecological factors behind them.
  • Within it the crops, crop combinations, cultivation methods, inputs and farming orientation broadly agree.
• It works as a device for grouping complex farm phenomena, so that they can be selected and studied at a regional scale.
• It is dynamic, changing in space and time. Two results of the Green Revolution show this:
  • Rice entered Punjab and Haryana.
  • Wheat spread into the lower Ganga plain.
• Its four characteristics:
  • It has a location.
  • Its boundaries are transitional, not sharp lines.
  • It may be formal or functional.
  • Regions can be arranged in a hierarchy (macro, meso, micro).

Delimitation: The Four Techniques

• Neighbouring regions shade into one another across a transitional belt, which makes exact delimitation hard.
• Geographers rely on four techniques:
  • Empirical technique
  • Single-element technique
  • Multi-element (statistical) technique
  • Quantitative-cum-qualitative technique

1. Empirical Technique

• It rests largely on farmers’ experience and observed facts.
• Oliver E. Baker first applied it to the agricultural belts of the USA, reading them from observed data.
  • He drew the Cotton Belt, the Corn Belt, and the Wheat Belt (winter and spring wheat).
  • Land where corn dominated became the Corn Belt.
• C. F. Jones, Taylor, Samuel Van Valkenburg and George B. Cressey carried it to other parts of the world.
• It yields a general picture of the cropping pattern and tends towards overgeneralisation.
• It is criticised as less objective and relatively unscientific.

2. Single-Element Technique

• An arbitrary technique: only one element of the farm landscape is considered.
  • The relative position of farm enterprises is compared, and usually the first-ranking crop is plotted.
  • Rice, wheat and bajra regions of India, drawn by dominant crop, illustrate it.
• Its main weakness is that it conceals the place of all other crops.
  • Calling Punjab a wheat region and western Uttar Pradesh a sugarcane belt hides their rice and other cash crops.
• It describes the farm scene poorly, since crops are rarely grown in isolation. In most of India they grow in combination, so a combinational analysis of crops tells more than a single-crop region.

3. Multi-Element (Statistical) Technique

• An improvement on the first two. It weighs a combination of closely associated features and so is more objective.
• Crop combination and livestock regions worked out by John C. Weaver, Doi and John T. Coppock are examples.
• Regions can be demarcated with three kinds of measure:
  • Cropping pattern, crop concentration and crop diversification.
  • Crop combination.
  • Regional pattern of agricultural productivity.
• In India, Mohammad Shafi, Jasbir Singh, Sapre, Deshpande and Tiwari have applied it with fairly good results.
• Its advantage: it is free from bias and keeps in view farm facts that bear on a farmer’s decisions.
• Without reliable data, however, it may miss the ground reality of a region’s farming.

4. Quantitative-cum-Qualitative Technique

• Physical, social and economic factors are weighed together:
  • Physical: terrain, slope, temperature, rainfall, soil and so on.
  • Social: land tenancy, size of holdings and fields, religion, customs and so on.
  • Economic: capital investment, marketing, storage and so on.
• A region here is generally an area homogeneous in its crops and livestock.
• It was applied by Baker (1926), Whittlesey (1936) and Carol (1952).
• 14 factors are commonly listed for demarcation:
  • Six physical: relief, climate, water (surface and sub-soil), soil, sub-soil and natural vegetation.
  • Two cultural: cultural vegetation and cultural structures.
  • Six functional: rural population, cultural and technological stage (with cultural and religious values), farming operations, the dependent rural population with the organisation supplying it with economic and cultural goods, and commerce (the degree of commercialisation).
• The main constraint is the lack of reliable data on most facets of farming over much of the earth, and cultural values are hard to quantify.
• Despite these limits, geographers still use it at macro, meso and micro levels.
• No regionalisation is yet universally accepted as explaining farming at local, regional, national and international levels alike.
  • Each scheme answers the purpose it was built for: a crop map shows what is grown, a climatic zoning shows what can be grown, and a planning zoning shows what should be promoted.

Agricultural Regions of India

• Indian schemes draw on topography, soil, climate, land-use pattern, water supply, farming practices, crop combination and productivity, along with agro-economic factors.
• Many attempts have been made over time:
  • E. Simkins (1926), D. Thorner (1956), Laurence Dudley Stamp (1958), Mohinder Singh Randhawa (1958), Chen Han-Seng (1959).
  • Oskar Spate and A. T. A. Learmonth (1960), Ramachandran (1963), E. Siddiqui (1967).
  • P. Sengupta and Galina Sdasyuk (1968), Otokar Slampa (1968), who proposed 13 regions.
  • B. L. C. Johnson (1969, 1979), R. L. Singh (1971), Jasbir Singh (1975).
• Official planning later added the 15 agro-climatic zones of the Planning Commission and the 20 agro-ecological regions of the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning.

Randhawa’s Agricultural Regions

• Randhawa, the agricultural scientist, set out five main agricultural regions in 1958 from climate, crops and livestock, with a parallel set of five animal husbandry regions.
• The five are:
  • The Temperate Himalayan Region.
  • The Northern Dry (Wheat) Region.
  • The Eastern Wet (Rice) Region.
  • The Western Wet (Malabar Coconut) Region.
  • The Southern Coarse Cereal (Millet, medium rainfall) Region.

1. The Temperate Himalayan Region

• It covers Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the west, and Arunachal Pradesh and Upper Assam in the east.
• Two sub-divisions:
  • Eastern part: Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Nagaland, Tripura and Upper Assam.
    • Heavy rainfall and thick forest.
    • Rice and tea dominate.
  • Western part: Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
    • Known for horticulture: apple, cherries, pears, peach, almond, apricot and walnut.
    • Maize, rice, wheat and potatoes follow.

2. The Northern Dry (Wheat) Region

• Spread: Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, north-west Madhya Pradesh and the irrigated part of Rajasthan.
• Average annual rainfall is under 75 cm, and parts are well served by canals and tube wells.
• Main crops: wheat, maize, cotton, mustard, gram, rice, sugarcane and millets.

3. The Eastern Wet (Rice) Region

• It takes in the greater parts of Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and coastal Andhra Pradesh.
• Rainfall exceeds 150 cm.
• Main crops: rice, jute, pulses, oilseeds, tea and sugarcane.

4. The Western Wet (Malabar) Region

• It runs from Maharashtra to Keralam (Kerala), with average annual rainfall above 200 cm.
• Rice leads among food crops, while coconut and plantations (rubber, coffee, spices, cashew nut and others) carry the cash economy.

5. The Southern Coarse (Cereals) Region

• It spreads over Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, southern Uttar Pradesh (Bundelkhand), eastern Maharashtra, western Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and western Tamil Nadu.
• Rainfall lies between 50 and 100 cm.
• Main crops: millets, bajra, cotton, groundnut, oilseeds and pulses.

Sengupta and Sdasyuk’s Agricultural Regionalisation

• In 1968, P. Sengupta and Galina Sdasyuk built a three-tier scheme in their Economic Regionalization of India.
  • 4 macro regions, from climate.
  • 11 meso regions, from physiography.
  • 60 micro regions, from crop combinations.
• Three macro zones rest on rainfall, while the Himalayan zone stands apart as a mountain unit.
• The tiers narrow step by step: each macro zone breaks into meso regions by relief, and each meso region into micro regions by the crops actually grown together.

• On this map the dry belt appears a second time in the rain shadow behind the Western Ghats, and a second patch of wet belt lines the west coast.

1. The Himalayan Agricultural Zone

• Annual rainfall varies from 120 to 250 cm.
• It covers Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, the Kumaon Himalaya and its foothills, Darjeeling, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and the Assam Himalaya.
• Being mountainous, it is treated as a negative area for cultivation and settlement, with little arable land.
• Rice, wheat, maize and orchards mark the west. Rice, tea and maize mark the east.

2. The Dry Agricultural Zone

• Punjab, Haryana, the Rajasthan desert plain, western Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat are the dry areas, with average rainfall of about 75 cm a year.
• Water is acutely short.
• Millets, wheat, oilseeds, cotton and groundnut grow with the help of good irrigation.

3. The Sub-Humid Agricultural Zone

• The Ganga plains (upper and middle) form its northern part. A long tract then runs through the Peninsula, from the Bundelkhand plateau across the lava country to the eastern coast.
• Annual rainfall varies from 75 to 100 cm.
• The share of cultivated land climbs high wherever irrigation water is available.
• The Ganga plains and the east coast deltas are the most intensively cultivated, with about 70 per cent of the land under the plough.
• Main crops: wheat, sugarcane, rice, gram, maize, millets, cotton, groundnut, oilseeds and tobacco.

4. The Wet Agricultural Zone

• It comprises the north-eastern plateaus: Chotanagpur, Odisha, the Bastar plateau, central Madhya Pradesh, the upper Mahanadi basin and the Kaimur hills, with the eastern hills and plateaus.
• Annual rainfall varies from 100 to 125 cm here, and rises to about 200 cm in Bengal and the north-east.
• Main crops: rice, tea, jute, oilseeds, gram, millets, wheat, sugarcane, banana and coconut.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research Classification

• The scheme of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) is simple and comprehensive.
• It rests on the predominance of crops and crop associations, and yields six regions.

1. Rice-Jute-Tea Region

• A vast region of lowlands, valleys and river deltas:
  • Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Meghalaya, West Bengal and Odisha.
  • Northern and eastern Bihar, parts of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, and the Tarai of Uttar Pradesh.
• Rainfall varies from 180 to 250 cm.
• Rice leads because of fertile alluvium, abundant rain and high summer temperatures.
• Jute is grown mainly in the Hugli basin of West Bengal, with newer areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Odisha and the Uttar Pradesh Tarai.
• Tea comes mainly from Assam, the Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri areas of West Bengal, and Tripura.
• Sugarcane and tobacco are grown in Bihar, and coconut in coastal areas.
• Horticulture: mango, pineapple, betel leaves, bananas, jackfruit and oranges.

2. Wheat and Sugarcane Region

• It comprises Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, western Madhya Pradesh and north-eastern Rajasthan.
• Most of it has rich alluvium, with some black and red soil.
• Rainfall is moderate. Much of it comes from the south-west monsoon in summer, and winter rain comes from western disturbances.
• Irrigation is a vital input in the drier parts.
• The main wheat belt extends over Punjab, Haryana, the Ganga-Yamuna doab of Uttar Pradesh and north-eastern Rajasthan.
• Sugarcane is grown mainly in Uttar Pradesh and adjoining Bihar.
• Rice, pulses and maize are other important crops.

3. Cotton Region

• It spreads over the regur (black cotton soil) of the Deccan plateau, with rainfall of 75 to 100 cm.
• Cotton is the main crop, along with jowar, bajra, gram, sugarcane, wheat and others.

4. Maize and Coarse Crops Region

• It includes western Rajasthan and northern Gujarat. Rainfall is scanty, normally below 50 cm.
• Farming is possible only with irrigation.
• Maize is grown mainly on the Mewar plateau, which also produces wheat and ragi.
• Rice, cotton and sugarcane are grown in the southern part, and bajra and pulses throughout.

5. Millet and Oilseeds Region

• It covers poor soils and broken topography on the Karnataka plateau, parts of Tamil Nadu, southern Andhra Pradesh and eastern Keralam, with rainfall of 75 to 125 cm.
• Millets: bajra, jowar and ragi. Oilseeds: groundnut and castor.
• Pulses are also grown, and mangoes and bananas are the important fruits.

6. Fruits and Vegetables Region

• It extends from the Kashmir Valley in the west to Assam in the east. Rainfall rises from 50 cm in the west to 200 cm in the east.
• Apple, peach, cherries, plum and apricot in the west, and oranges in the east.
• Rice, maize, ragi, potatoes, chillies and vegetables are also grown.

• This map names the sixth region Fruits, Vegetables and Barley and shades only its Kashmir end. The eastern hills towards Assam fall inside its rice, jute and tea shading.