Agricultural Development in Tamil Nadu*

Abstract

With a landspread of about 13,000 sq. km., Tamil Nadu is the eleventh State in geographic area in India, whereas with 48.75 million people it ranks seventh in population The population density per sq. km. is 375 as against the national average of 203. The total cultivated area of the State is 61,69,000 hectares, which is 47.45% of the total area. This is far above the optimum of one-third of the total area to be cultivated by any State for an ecological balance. As against the required optimum of about 40 lakh he that should be under forest, only 23 lakh ha has a forest cover, which works out to only 15% of the total area, which is much lower than the national average of 23%. At the present annual growth rate of 2.2%, the State's population will exceed 72 million by 2,000 A.D. As against one ha of culti-vated land supporting about 8 persons to-day, by the turn of the century, the same one ha will have to support 17 persons or more. This is about double the national average of human pressure on cultivated land. Therefore, the prob-lems of human and natural resource management in the State of Tamil Nadu, which are already in a bad shape, will become very acute and if adequate corrective stops and appropriate advance

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.003308

Pages

13 - 17

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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