Rice India is one of the major rice producing and consuming countries in the world.
Rice is also the single most important crop in Indian agriculture.
It is produced in all the states of the country and is part of the staple diet of a very large section of the Indian population. Rice is cultivated on nearly two-thirds of the total gross cropped area, i.e., on 42 million hectares. China is a distant second with only 31.2 million hectares of land deployed under paddy. Compared to the other rice producing nations, Indian yields are low at around 2,850 kilograms of paddy per hectare. The world average is 3,603 kilograms, with Egypt yielding 7,603 and China and Japan providing around 5,800 kilograms of paddy per hectare.