Why future of India’s cotton sector hinges on ease of doing research

India’s Mission for Cotton Productivity is a timely acknowledgement that cotton is central to farm incomes and the textile value chain, but it will deliver only if India treats research and innovation as the mission’s first priority – not a supporting activity. The cotton economy is now constrained less by farmer effort and more by the speed at which new science, new seed and new systems move from labs and trials into large-scale adoption. 

The numbers that matter

India remains the world’s largest cotton cultivator – about 11.8 million hectares – yet productivity is low at roughly 441–447 kg lint/ha, leaving India far behind global benchmarks. For context, a recent USDA update places India’s lint yield around 446 kg/ha against a world average near 785 kg/ha, underscoring the scale of the gap. Production estimates for 2024–25 vary by estimator, ranging from about 294.25 lakh bales to around 31.24 million bales (170 kg bales), but the direction of travel remains worrying. 

This is precisely why the mission matters: even modest improvements in yield and cost-efficiency, multiplied across India’s massive acreage, can translate into dramatic gains for farmers and raw material security for textiles. But the mission will not achieve that multiplication unless it fixes the innovation pipeline that has slowed to a crawl. 

Make “ease of doing research” the backbone

Without research, we cannot find solutions to the looming challenges. Cotton is unforgiving about time: miss a season, lose a year of learning, seed multiplication, and deployment. When State-specific approvals and trial permissions arrive after sowing windows, the system effectively creates delay by design – no matter how good the science is. India’s broader R&D challenge is well-recognised, including modest national R&D intensity of about 0.6–0.7% of GDP in recent years, and cotton is one of the clearest places where this translates into slow technology renewal on farms. 

The mission should therefore institutionalise a season-aligned, time-bound pathway for field trials and technology evaluation – clear requirements, clear timelines, and clear accountability for every stage. It must also remove last-mile friction that stalls trials on the ground, especially delays linked to state-level permissions, because those delays are effectively yield losses at the national scale. A mission that funds inputs but cannot move research through seasons will not move productivity. 

PBW: Innovation must outrun resistance

No cotton mission can succeed without overcoming the Pink Bollworm (PBW) trap. PBW resistance has steadily eroded the protection once offered by earlier Bt cotton technology, contributing to yield stress and compounding farmer risk. The country needs the next generation of PBW-control solutions – evaluated rigorously, but moved through the pipeline fast enough to matter in real time. 

India already has domestic developers with PBW-oriented technologies seeking to progress through regulatory stages, and delay carries a very real cost: miss the trial season and the technology’s path to farmers slips by a year. Treating PBW-control technologies as a national priority within the mission – monitored by a high-level coordination mechanism that tracks progress and unblocks bottlenecks – would convert the mission from a statement of intent into an execution discipline. This is what innovation leadership looks like in agriculture: not shortcuts, but predictable, modern processes that respect seasons and reward evidence generation. ​

Mechanisation and HDPS: Redesign cotton for machines and vice versa

Even perfect pest control will not restore cotton’s viability if the cost structure remains dominated by labour scarcity – especially picking. Manual harvesting is labour-intensive and repeated multiple times; picking alone can account for roughly 30–35% of total cultivation cost, and labour scarcity during peak season pushes costs higher. Mechanisation is therefore not optional; it is the only credible route to stabilising costs, meeting agronomic windows, and keeping farmers in cotton. ​

But mechanisation cannot be “added on” to plant types and spacing that were never designed for machines. High Density Planting System (HDPS) offers a scalable production redesign: semi-compact, short-duration genotypes planted at much higher populations – about 60,000 to 75,000 plants per hectare – so that yield comes from bolls per unit area and maturity becomes more uniform for machine operations. The mission should push HDPS as an integrated package – HDPS-ready genetics, sowing equipment that can establish high populations quickly, precision spraying tools, and harvesting solutions suited to small and fragmented holdings through service models and shared access. 

A practical bottleneck must be solved upfront: machine-harvested kapas can carry high trash content (often 8–12%), and farmers need field-level pre-cleaners to bring trash down to market-acceptable levels (below ~2%) so mechanisation does not reduce price realisation. If markets penalise mechanised output, adoption will stall regardless of the agronomic logic.

Pay for lint and quality

Finally, incentives must align with national goals. India’s cotton marketing still begins with kapas, and support signals do not adequately reward ginning out-turn (GOT), even though higher GOT directly increases lint output without expanding acreage. A GOT-linked MSP or quality bonus framework would create a pull for high-GOT, HDPS-suited genotypes and make farmer adoption economically rational – not merely advisable. ​

The Mission for Cotton Productivity is a good start, but its critical success factor is clear: put research and innovation at the centre, and then let every other lever – PBW solutions, HDPS and mechanisation packages, post-harvest infrastructure, and quality-linked incentives – flow from that innovation pipeline at mission speed. 

END OF ARTICLE