India has steadily improved agricultural productivity and is producing record quantities of foodgrains, but a wide yield gap with China persists, with Chinese farms producing close to twice as much grain from each hectare of cultivated land, highlighting one of the biggest structural challenges facing Indian agriculture.
India’s foodgrain production is estimated to have touched a record 376.56 million tonnes in 2025-26, helped by higher output of major crops including rice, wheat and maize. The increase reflects improvements in seeds, irrigation, mechanisation and farming practices over the years. However, comparisons of productivity show that India continues to require considerably more land to produce the same quantity of grain as China.
China maintains large yield advantage
Official and international agricultural data put China’s cereal yield at more than six tonnes per hectare, compared with roughly three-and-a-half tonnes per hectare in India. Earlier comparable data for 2022 showed China producing 633.13 million tonnes of cereals from 99.22 million hectares, translating into a yield of 6.38 tonnes per hectare. India cultivated a slightly larger 100.99 million hectares but produced 362.47 million tonnes, with an average yield of 3.59 tonnes per hectare.
The gap is particularly significant because the two Asian giants face the common challenge of feeding populations of more than a billion people while managing pressure on agricultural land and water. China’s advantage has been attributed to factors including higher irrigation coverage, greater mechanisation, intensive input use, improved crop varieties and stronger agricultural infrastructure.
China’s latest numbers continue to demonstrate its productivity advantage. Its total grain production reached about 714.9 million tonnes in 2025, with an average yield of nearly six tonnes per hectare. Cereal yields were even higher at about 6.56 tonnes per hectare, including around 7.2 tonnes for rice, 5.94 tonnes for wheat and 6.7 tonnes for maize.
India records production gains
India, however, has made substantial progress of its own. The government’s third advance estimates for 2025-26 put overall foodgrain output at an all-time high, with rice, wheat and maize among the crops recording strong production. Wheat output has also benefited from expanded cultivation and productivity improvements, while maize production has grown amid rising demand from livestock feed and other industries.
The productivity challenge is increasingly important because India has limited scope to keep expanding the area under cultivation. Future increases in agricultural output will therefore have to come increasingly from producing more from existing farmland rather than bringing additional land under crops.
Closing the gap will require improvements in irrigation efficiency, access to quality seeds, agricultural research, mechanisation and precision farming, along with better extension services that allow new technologies to reach small and marginal farmers. Climate change adds another layer of urgency, with erratic rainfall, heatwaves and water stress threatening future gains.
For India, the comparison with China therefore illustrates both the progress achieved and the scale of the opportunity ahead. Even modest improvements in yields across India’s vast cultivated area could translate into millions of tonnes of additional production without increasing the pressure on scarce farmland.