Marketable Surplus and Post Harvest Losses of Wheat

Among all the food articles, food-grain constitutes the most significant part of the Indian diet. Nearly 60 per cent of an average Indian's food expenditure gets spent on food grains. India in sixties was dependent on import of food products to feed its teaming millions. The demand for food grains in India is increasing rapidly because of population growth and rising income. At that time the major challenge to the scientific community in India was to increase the food grain production not only to provide adequate food to its ever increasing population but also to create surplus for export to stimulate its overall growth. As per the demand and production basis it can be said that among the cereal crops, wheat is the important crop growing in many parts of the country. Wheat is being cultivated from prehistoric times (500 B.C.). India is the second largest wheat growing country in the world after the Peoples Republic of China. There has been a phenomenal increase in wheat production in India after independence, which has gone up from 5.6 million metric tonnes in 1947-48 to about more than 96.00 million metric tonnes in 2014-15.