The statistics are very revealing. India produces 87.6 million tons rice from 42.4 million hectares on the other hand China produces 178 million tons of rice from a mere 29 million hectares. There is only one big difference; China embraced ‘hybrid rice’ technology in a big way, while India has had a slow start.

“India should embrace hybrid rice technology if future food shortages have to be overcome and for this China is willing to actively work with Indian rice breeders,’’ Dr. Cheng Shi-hua, Director General of the China National Rice Research Institute, Hangzhou, China. “Hybrid rice has solved China’s food shortages,” said Shi-hua, who was in India recently on an invitation by the government.  

Shi-hua suggests early capital investments by the Indian government to popularise this modern way of producing rice.

Hybrid rice plants are vigorous crop varieties that give a 25 per cent higher yield simply because the seeds are produced from very diverse parents. The downside is that farmers need to buy these seeds again and again every year because the progeny retained from the farmer’s own field loose `hybrid vigor’. The seeds are also expensive costing four-four times more than the normal seeds.

India today has a mere 1.2 million hectares under hybrid rice cultivation and the seeds are mostly produced mostly in the private sector, while 54 per cent of all Chinese rice is grown using hybrid varieties amounting to about 15 million hectares and most of the seeds are produced by the public sector.

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