India wheat, rice production to rise to record high, government says
India, the world's biggest wheat producer after China, produced 113.3 million tons of wheat in 2024, the farm ministry said in a statement issued late on Wednesday.
However, a leading industry body said the crop was nearly 6.25% lower than the government's estimate.
The country's rice production in 2025 is also set to climb to a record high, with the ministry estimating it at 149 million metric tons, up from last year's 137.8 million tons.
Record production of wheat and rice will lift the country's total food grains production to 354 million tons from last year's 332.3 million tons.
A strong wheat harvest in India is rapidly replenishing stocks, meaning the country will be able to meet domestic demand without imports this year, contrary to market talk that it would need overseas supplies, and a potential drag on global prices.
India is the world's biggest exporter of rice and higher production will help New Delhi to increase shipments.
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Reuters
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Trump again threatens 'very substantial' tariff hikes for India over Russian oil
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An economist with a strong grasp of politics, Meghnad Desai, who has died aged 85, put telling the truth ahead of the pursuit of personal ambition. His work as professor at the London School of Economics had the wide perspective that came from his Indian heritage, and his interest in Labour politics led to him becoming an active member of the House of Lords. The first of his books, Marxian Economic Theory, was published in 1973. I was one of his many students who benefited from the use of his book Applied Econometrics (1976). Testing Monetarism (1981) predicted the demise of the money-supply targeting that was then being pursued by Margaret Thatcher's government. Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (2002) contains perhaps his best-known contribution to the discipline. He asserted that Karl Marx had been misunderstood: he never said that capitalism was going to collapse anytime soon. On Meghnad's reading, Marx expected capitalism to continue until it had exhausted its productive potential, which given globalisation, could take a very long time. Appointed to the Lords by Neil Kinnock in 1991, he became a frontbench economics spokesman, but was sacked three years later by John Smith when a theoretical speculation of his ran counter to Labour's need for a presentable tax policy. Meghnad backed a proposal to widen the scope of the VAT net to include food and children's clothing. This view was subsequently supported in 2010 by Sir James Mirrlees' review for the Institute for Fiscal Studies as to how a more rational tax system could operate, but it was not a political headline that Labour was looking for in 1994. More presciently, he pointed out in early August 2022 that if Liz Truss were elected as Conservative leader and so the new prime minister, which she was a month later, then she would crash the pound. On the international stage, Meghnad championed a move away from a narrow focus on material progress in measuring development, and proposed instead a human development index. This found its way into the human development reports produced by the UN. With particular regard to India, Meghnad was an early proponent of, and an optimist about, the market-based reforms that were first introduced in 1991 and were to mark a turning point for Indian economic growth. In a tribute at the time of his deah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him a 'distinguished thinker and reformer'. His later writings included Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (2004), on the film star who brought method acting to Indian cinema; Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror (2006), distinguishing between the religion and the militant mindset; and The Rediscovery of India (2011), covering the last 500 years of the region's history. 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He is survived by Kishwar, his children and four grandchildren, Om, Ira, Chloe and Kiko. Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Lord Desai, economist, born 10 July 1940; died 29 July 2025
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