Last week, India’s federal government asked five non-traditional onion growing states including Rajasthan to increase the area under the crop by 9,900 hectares in the forthcoming kharif season to avoid any price rises. Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are major kharif onion growing states, while Rajasthan, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh are five states which are non-traditional onion growing states.
Chalking out a strategy for the forthcoming kharif season of the 2021-22 crop year (July-June), Agriculture Commissioner S K Malhotra in a conference with state governments emphasised on the need to increase kharif onion area in non-traditional states.
According to outlookindia.com¸ this would help when availability gets affected in traditional onion growing areas due to natural calamities, he said. He asked five non-traditional onion growing states to increase onion area in the kharif season of this year to 51,000 hectares from 41,081 hectares in the year-ago period.