Agriculture Class 10: NCERT Geography Chapter 4 PDF

This is the official Agriculture chapter — Chapter 4 of the NCERT Class 10 Social Science book Contemporary India II (Geography) — a 12-page chapter printed on pages 30–41 of the current NCERT edition. It covers how India farms, what it grows and where, and how the state has reformed agriculture. The official NCERT PDF of the chapter is right below.

This is the file students search for as “ncert class 10 social science chapter 4 agriculture pdf”: the full chapter text, every figure, and the exercises on page 40, published officially at ncert.nic.in. Below the download you will find a section-by-section map of the chapter, the tables it builds for seasons and crops, and the mistakes students make in it.

The official edition of this chapter is published on the NCERT e-textbook portal, and that is the authoritative source for the file. Download the official Agriculture Class 10 Chapter 4 PDF from this portal, where every NCERT textbook is available class-wise and subject-wise, chapter by chapter, at no cost.

Chapter 4 Agriculture at a Glance

This section is for navigating the file before you read a word. The chapter table on this page counts what the chapter holds; the list below shows the order those contents actually appear in.

• Opening: agriculture as a primary activity on which two-thirds of the population depends (p. 30)
• Types of Farming — primitive subsistence, intensive subsistence, commercial and plantation (pp. 30–31)
• Cropping Pattern — the rabi, kharif and zaid seasons (p. 32)
• Major Crops — rice, wheat, millets, maize and pulses, with the rice and wheat distribution maps (pp. 32–36)
• Food Crops other than Grains — sugarcane, oilseeds, tea, coffee and horticulture (pp. 36–37)
• Non-Food Crops — rubber, cotton and jute (pp. 38–39)
• Technological and Institutional Reforms (pp. 38–39)
• Bhoodan–Gramdan (p. 39)
• Exercises on page 40 and a closing hidden-words puzzle on page 41

Three short activities are threaded through the chapter: listing rubber items people use (p. 38), exploring the Farmers’ Portal for agricultural schemes (p. 39), and solving the puzzle (p. 41).

What This Chapter Teaches, and How It Is Organised

This section gives the big picture, so every later section has somewhere to hang. The chapter is a geography of production — it answers three questions in sequence.

• How does India farm? The farming types and what decides them (pp. 30–31).
• What does India grow, and where? The cropping seasons, then each crop with its conditions and producer states (pp. 32–39).
• How does the state support farming? The institutional and technological reforms, and Bhoodan–Gramdan (pp. 38–39).

Notice the skeleton every crop paragraph follows: season → geographical conditions (temperature, rainfall, soil) → leading producer states. That repetition is the chapter’s built-in revision structure — learn the skeleton and the crop table below fills itself in.

One honest note: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical. Use this chapter to learn the geography; check the current official CBSE syllabus to confirm what is examinable this session.

Types of Farming: Primitive Subsistence to Commercial

This section explains the farming systems the chapter contrasts. What decides the type of farming is the inputs used and who the produce feeds — the family, the local market, or industry.

Primitive subsistence farming is practised on small patches of land with primitive tools such as the hoe, dao and digging sticks, using family or community labour.

It depends on the monsoon and the natural fertility of the soil, and it is a “slash and burn” method: farmers clear a patch, grow cereals and food crops for the family, and shift to a fresh patch when fertility falls. Productivity stays low because no fertilisers or modern inputs are used.

(NCERT, p. 30) Slash-and-burn shifting cultivation has a local name in almost every region, and short answers ask for them. Group them this way:

• North-east: jhumming (Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland); also Pamlou in Manipur, Dipa in the Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, and in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
• Madhya Pradesh: Bewar or Dahiya
• Andhra Pradesh: Podu or Penda
• Odisha: Pama Dabi, Koman or Bringa
• Western Ghats: Kumari
• South-eastern Rajasthan: Valre or Waltre
• Himalayan belt: Khil
• Jharkhand: Kuruwa

Outside India the same farming is called Milpa (Mexico and Central America), Conuco (Venezuela), Roca (Brazil), Masole (Central Africa), Ladang (Indonesia) and Ray (Vietnam). The photograph in the figure walkthrough below (Fig. 4.1) exists precisely to fix these names in memory.

Intensive subsistence farming is practised in areas of high population pressure on land. It is labour-intensive, using high doses of biochemical inputs and irrigation to get higher production. The right of inheritance has divided land among successive generations, making holdings uneconomically small — yet farmers still extract maximum output from limited land.

(NCERT, p. 31) Commercial farming uses higher doses of modern inputs — high yielding variety (HYV) seeds, chemical fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides — to raise productivity. The same crop can flip between the two types by region: rice is a commercial crop in Haryana and Punjab but a subsistence crop in Odisha.

Plantation is a type of commercial farming in which a single crop is grown on a large area, forming an interface of agriculture and industry: capital-intensive inputs, migrant labour, and all produce used as raw material in industry. Tea, coffee, rubber, sugarcane and banana are important plantation crops. (NCERT, pp. 30–31)

Cropping Pattern: Rabi, Kharif and Zaid

This section sets the three-season clock the rest of the chapter runs on. India organises its crops by when water is available, and the year divides into three cropping seasons.

Two details sharpen rabi answers. Rabi crops succeed partly because of precipitation from western temperate cyclones in winter, and partly because the Green Revolution helped wheat in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan. Paddy is grown as three crops — Aus, Aman and Boro — in Assam, West Bengal and Odisha.

Sugarcane takes almost a year, so it does not fit into one season. (NCERT, p. 32)

Major Crops: Conditions and Producer States

This section delivers the chapter’s crop-by-crop core as one comparison table. For every crop the chapter asks the same three questions — season, conditions, producer states — so one table holds most of the exam content.

Three facts in the table are the ones students get wrong, so they are worth flagging. First, rice normally needs annual rainfall above 100 cm, yet it grows in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan — areas of less rainfall — because a dense network of canal irrigation and tubewells supplies the water.

Second, pulses are leguminous and fix nitrogen from the air, except arhar. Third, jowar, not wheat, is the third most important food crop of India by area and production. (NCERT, pp. 32–36)

Food Crops beyond Grains and Non-Food Crops

This section covers the remaining crop families — sugarcane, oilseeds, beverages, horticulture, rubber and fibres. Their conditions are distinctive, and tea and coffee are the pair students most often swap, so compare them side by side.

Sugarcane is a tropical as well as subtropical crop. It grows well in hot and humid climate with a temperature of 21°C to 27°C and annual rainfall between 75 cm and 100 cm, needs irrigation where rainfall is low, and can be grown on a variety of soils with manual labour from sowing to harvesting.

India is the second largest producer after Brazil, and the crop is the main source of sugar, gur (jaggery), khandsari and molasses. (NCERT, p. 36) Oil seeds cover about 12 per cent of the total cropped area, and in 2020 India was the second largest producer of groundnut in the world after China.

Groundnut is a kharif crop and accounts for about half of the major oilseeds produced, with Gujarat the largest producer in 2026-27 followed by Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. Linseed and mustard are rabi crops; sesamum is kharif in the north and rabi in the south; castor seed is grown as both.

Some oilseeds are also raw material for soap, cosmetics and ointments.

(NCERT, p. 36) Horticulture made India the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables after China in 2020, and the chapter lists a fruit map of its own: mangoes of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal; oranges of Nagpur and Cherrapunjee; bananas of Kerala, Mizoram, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu; lichi and guava of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; pineapples of Meghalaya; grapes of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra; and apples, pears, apricots and walnuts of Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.

India also produces pea, cauliflower, onion, cabbage, tomato, brinjal and potato. (NCERT, p. 37)

Use the table this way: any question asking for a beverage crop and its geographical conditions is answered in full by tea or coffee — name the crop, then give climate, soil and rainfall exactly as above. (NCERT, pp. 36–37) Rubber is an equatorial crop, also grown in tropical and sub-tropical areas under special conditions.

It needs a moist and humid climate with rainfall of more than 200 cm and temperature above 25°C, and it is an important industrial raw material grown mainly in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, the Andaman and Nicobar islands and the Garo hills of Meghalaya.

(NCERT, p. 38) Fibre crops are cotton, jute, hemp and natural silk — the first three from crops grown in the soil, silk from cocoons of silkworms fed on green leaves, specially mulberry; rearing silkworms for silk fibre is called sericulture.

India is believed to be the original home of the cotton plant, and it is the second largest producer of cotton after China.

Cotton grows in the drier parts of the black cotton soil of the Deccan plateau, needing high temperature, light rainfall or irrigation, 210 frost-free days and bright sunshine; it is a kharif crop that takes 6 to 8 months to mature.

Jute is known as the golden fibre, growing on well-drained fertile soils in flood plains where soils are renewed every year, with high temperature during growth; it is used in gunny bags, mats, ropes, yarn, carpets and other artefacts. (NCERT, p. 38)

Technological and Institutional Reforms, and Bhoodan–Gramdan

This section is the chapter’s shift from physical geography to policy — what the state did to lift agriculture off dependence on the monsoon and natural fertility.

The problem first: sustained use of land without compatible techno-institutional changes has hindered agricultural development. Even after the spread of irrigation, most farmers in large parts of the country still depend on the monsoon and natural fertility, and agriculture provides livelihood for more than 60 per cent of the population. That is why the chapter argues reforms were serious and necessary.

(NCERT, p. 38)

Bhoodan–Gramdan grew out of Vinoba Bhave’s padyatra to spread Mahatma Gandhi’s message after his martyrdom. At a lecture in Pochampally, Telangana, landless villagers demanded land, and Shri Ram Chandra Reddy rose and offered 80 acres for 80 landless families — this act was called Bhoodan.

Zamindars who offered whole villages gave Gramdan, and many landowners gave part of their land fearing the land ceiling act. The movement, initiated by Vinoba Bhave, is known as the Blood-less Revolution. (NCERT, p. 39)

Reading the Figures: Photos and Distribution Maps

This section walks through the chapter’s key photographs and its two distribution maps. The chapter is illustrated to make conditions visible — each photograph pairs with a crop’s requirements, and each caption is a revision note in itself.

The photo sits beside the slash-and-burn passage on page 30, and its caption is exactly the list of regional names from the Types of Farming section above. Use it as a memory exercise: cover the caption, look at the image, and try to name the farming type for each region. (NCERT, p. 30)

Fig. 4.2 shows what a plantation looks like on the ground — one crop over a large area. Link the image to the chapter’s definition: interface of agriculture and industry, capital-intensive inputs, migrant labour, and all produce as raw material. The chapter also shows a bamboo plantation in the north-east (Fig. 4.3) on the same page. (NCERT, p. 31)

The rice field in Fig. 4.4(a) is the staple kharif crop in the ground — standing water is the visible clue to its conditions: above 25°C and annual rainfall above 100 cm, with irrigation in lower-rainfall regions. Its companion image, Fig. 4.4(b), shows rice ready to be harvested. (NCERT, p. 32)

Wheat in Fig. 4.5 is the rabi contrast to rice — a cool growing season, bright sunshine at ripening, and 50 to 75 cm of evenly distributed rainfall. The Ganga–Satluj plains and the Deccan black soil are the two wheat zones shown by the distribution map on pages 34–35. (NCERT, p. 34)

Bajra in Fig. 4.6 is the visual answer to its soil condition — it grows well on sandy soils and shallow black soil, with Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Haryana as the major producers. Ragi and jowar, the other two millets, share the same paragraph on page 34.

Sugarcane in Fig. 4.8 carries the chapter’s temperature rule on the stalk: hot and humid climate, 21°C to 27°C, rainfall 75 to 100 cm, grown on a variety of soils with manual labour from sowing to harvesting. India is the second largest producer after Brazil. (NCERT, p. 36)

Tea in Fig. 4.10 is the classic plantation crop: warm, moist, frost-free climate, deep fertile well-drained soil rich in humus and organic matter, frequent showers for tender leaves, and abundant cheap skilled labour. Tea is processed within the garden to restore freshness — which is why tea gardens in Assam and North Bengal are industrial sites, not just fields. (NCERT, pp. 36–37)

Cotton in Fig. 4.14 grows in the drier parts of the black cotton soil of the Deccan plateau. The conditions around the photograph are the ones short answers need: high temperature, light rainfall or irrigation, 210 frost-free days and bright sunshine, maturing in 6 to 8 months. (NCERT, p. 38)

Fig. 4.15 belongs to the reforms half of the chapter, not to any single crop. It makes the point that the Green Revolution ran on package technology — HYV seeds, fertilisers, irrigation and machinery together — and that the 1980s and 1990s added a comprehensive land development programme on top of it. (NCERT, p. 39)

The book also prints two full-page distribution maps, India: Distribution of Rice (pp. 32–33) and India: Distribution of Wheat (pp. 34–35). Use them to fix the producer states in your memory: the rice row of the crop table above is a description of the rice map, and the wheat row is a description of the wheat map.

The remaining photographs — maize, oilseeds, tea-leaf harvesting, fruits and vegetables — repeat the same pattern: one crop, one set of conditions, one set of states.

Key Terms You Need to Define

This section is a glossary. Several of the chapter’s exercise questions are definitions or “name and conditions” questions, so these terms have to be ready to write in 30 words.

Mistakes Students Make in This Chapter

This section names the specific mix-ups before you make them. Most lost marks in this chapter come from a handful of repeatable errors, and each correction below is grounded in the chapter text.

How the Exercises on Page 40 Test This Chapter

This section maps the chapter’s own exercise questions to the pages that answer them, so revision targets the exact question shapes the chapter supports.

• Q1(i) — “a single crop grown on a large area” describes plantation agriculture (p. 31)
• Q1(ii) — the rabi crop among the options is gram (p. 32)
• Q1(iii) — the leguminous crop is pulses (p. 35)
• Q2(i) — one beverage crop and its geographical conditions: tea or coffee, using the comparison table above (p. 37)
• Q2(ii) — one staple crop and its regions: rice, with the regions on pp. 32–33
• Q2(iii) — institutional reform programmes: collectivisation, consolidation of holdings, cooperation, abolition of zamindari, crop insurance, Grameen banks, cooperative societies, KCC, PAIS and minimum support price (pp. 38–39)
• Q3(i) — initiatives to increase agricultural production: Green Revolution package technology, White Revolution, credit and insurance schemes and minimum support price (pp. 38–39)
• Q3(ii) — geographical conditions for rice: above 25°C, high humidity, annual rainfall above 100 cm, with irrigation where rainfall is low (pp. 32–33)

The multiple-choice questions test direct concept recall; the 30-word questions are name-and-conditions questions; the 120-word questions are the explanation ones. A full-marks answer to Q3(ii) must give the temperature, humidity, the rainfall figure with the irrigation exception, and at least one producing region.

The chapter closes with a hidden-words puzzle on page 41. Its six clues run straight down the chapter’s headline facts: the two staple food crops are rice and wheat; the summer cropping season is zaid; pulses contain protein; a coarse grain is jowar; the two beverages are tea and coffee; and the fibre grown on black soils is cotton.

If you can answer all six before checking the grid, the chapter’s core facts are in place.

Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical, so treat this map as revision of the chapter and confirm the current session’s official syllabus from CBSE. The project work — tracing wheat-producing areas on an outline map — is good practice for the two distribution maps.

The Whole Chapter on One Page

This is a compressed final pass: the few facts per topic that carry most of the marks, in the chapter’s own order. Page citations point back to the full treatment above.

Related Resources for Class 10 Social Science

Agriculture is Chapter 4 of Contemporary India II, the Geography book in the Class 10 Social Science set. The previous chapter is Water Resources and the next chapter is Minerals and Energy Resources, both in the same book.

If the geography here is still settling, the Class 10 Social Science notes carry the same chapters in study form, and the Class 10 notes hub links every subject in the class. The wider CBSE notes index covers all classes, and economics chapters such as Money and Credit extend the credit-and-loan story that the reforms section begins.

The authoritative source for the official file is the NCERT e-textbook portal, where Contemporary India II is published chapter by chapter. NCERT settles the textbook and its editions; CBSE settles the curriculum, the syllabus and the examinations — so the examinable syllabus for the current session is confirmed by checking the official CBSE document.

Reference: NCERT Class 10 Social Science textbook, chapter 4, official edition on ncert.nic.in.

Sources and Data Verification

The page figures describe the NCERT Class 10 Social Science textbook Contemporary India II (Geography), Chapter 4 “Agriculture”, in the current official edition published at ncert.nic.in. Printed page numbers 30–41 are used throughout this page and match the official PDF.

This page covers that single chapter of that single book. It does not cover other chapters of Contemporary India II, other textbooks in the Class 10 set, or any other class. This listing is maintained for the current academic session using the NCERT information available to us.

NCERT is the authority for the textbook, its editions and the official PDFs; CBSE is the authority for the curriculum, the syllabus and the examinations. Where the two interact — for example, what is examinable in the current session — the official CBSE syllabus document is the final check.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which of these is a rabi crop: rice, gram, millets or cotton?

Gram. Rabi crops are sown in winter from October to December and harvested in summer from April to June, and gram is one of the important rabi crops along with wheat, barley, peas and mustard (NCERT, p. 32). Rice, millets and cotton are kharif crops.

What are the three cropping seasons of India and when do they fall?

Rabi, kharif and zaid. Rabi is sown October–December and harvested April–June; kharif is sown with the onset of the monsoon and harvested September–October; zaid is the short summer season between rabi and kharif, producing watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, vegetables and fodder crops (NCERT, p. 32).

What geographical conditions are needed for growing rice?

Rice needs high temperature above 25°C, high humidity and annual rainfall above 100 cm; in areas of less rainfall it grows with the help of irrigation. A dense network of canal irrigation and tubewells made it possible to grow rice in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan (NCERT, pp. 32–33).

Why is jute called the golden fibre and where is it grown?

The chapter gives jute the name golden fibre. Jute grows well on well-drained fertile soils in the flood plains where soils are renewed every year, and needs high temperature during growth; West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Odisha and Meghalaya are the major producers, and it is used in gunny bags, mats, ropes, yarn, carpets and other artefacts (NCERT, p. 38).

What was the Bhoodan–Gramdan movement and who started it?

It was initiated by Vinoba Bhave. At Pochampally in Telangana, Shri Ram Chandra Reddy offered 80 acres of land to be distributed among 80 landless villagers — this act was Bhoodan; zamindars who offered whole villages gave Gramdan. The movement is also known as the Blood-less Revolution (NCERT, p. 39).

Where can I download the official NCERT Class 10 Agriculture chapter PDF?

From the official NCERT e-textbook portal, where every class’s textbooks are published chapter by chapter at no cost; the Agriculture chapter is Chapter 4 of Contemporary India II.