A lot has been said and written on the state of agriculture in India and if the recently-announced largesse of Rs 60,000 crore in the form of farm loan waivers can do anything significant to mitigate the plight of the Indian farmer. In this context, it may not be out of place to reflect on the even bigger challenge India will be forced to face in the near future when it comes to agriculture and its food security. Let us start with some hard facts and ground realities. For almost 25 years now, the growth of agricultural output has languished between 2% and 3% per year barring a few exceptional years when it touched about 5%. In the poorest of states such as Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the growth of farm output has been just about 1% per year for the last decade. In the same period, the population has increased by over 400 million and continues to increase by almost 20 million per year. Over the last three decades, farm productivity has consistently remained much below average in just about every staple commodity with minimal improvement despite various attempts and missions to improve yields. Both in rice and wheat, India's productivity languishes at merely 30-35% levels of the leading countries. There has been practically no change in the net cultivable area or the sown area, which remains more or less stagnant at around 185 million and 145 million hectares, respectively. On top of this, there is an alarming degradation of water resources with the per capita availability of water down to 20% of the figure of the 1950s. This is leading to an alarming reduction in the water table across the most fertile of places such as Punjab and thereby leading to the impending situation of steady decline in the area available for sowing crops in the coming years, with a marginal decline of about 3 million hectares already in the last 20 years. The situation will be further aggravated as more pressure comes on available land on account of rapid growth in population and thereby expansion of habitation, physical infrastructure in the form of roads and buildings, and industrialisation. It is therefore no surprise that the food availability per capita has now become stagnant over the last 20 years. The much-touted "young India' has another implication in the context of food