In the wake of trade liberalization and globalization the agricultural
sector in India faces an uphill task of meeting global competition, reducing
unemployment and enhancing income in the rural areas. This task has to be
accomplished in a million of stagnant productivity across crops and other
agricultural enterprises declining investments in agriculture, silent neglect of
agricultural research and development and above all, increasingly degrading
natural resource base. Diversification of agriculture towards selective high
value crops has been recommended as one of the strategies for meeting
these challenges.
The decades of 1980s and 1990s, withnessed horticulture and
livestock-led agricultural diversification in India, through regionally most of it
was confined to the southern and western regions, consequently marketed
surplus output ratio expressed as a percentage of gross value of output in the
case of fruits and vegetables went up from 70 percent in 1981-82 to 88.2
percent in 1999-2000. Further, the last decade of the century was christened
as the Golden Revolution period in the history of Indian horticulture due to the
impressive growth rate of 6.50 percent per annum and a quantum jump in its
share in the agricultural gross domestic product from 18.2 percent to 29.5
percent, within horticulture, vegetable growing is considered more important
as it generates more income and employment promotes equity, improve
nutrition and protects and conserves the ecology. India has emerged as the
second largest producer of vegetables after china. vegetable production
touched the highest level of 91 million tonnes in 2014-15.The studies have
shown that the demand for vegetables is expected to grow at an average rate
of 9.2 percent per annum, requiring doubling of vegetable production. The
Government of India has recently launched a plethora of measures to boost
production in the horticultural sector. These measures, inter alia, include
extension of technology mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture,
launching of a National Horticulture Mission to double the horticultural
production, creation of additional cold storage facilities and allocation of
additional budgetary provision for the Hi-Tech Horticulture and Precision
Farming.