In the past seven decades, the Indian government has given more importance to agricultural production and food security than the income of farmers. Most significantly, during the last half-century, India’s production of food crops multiplied 4.7 fold. However, the strategies could not identify the need to increase the farmers’ income, and there was no direct relation to support farmers’ welfare. The cropping pattern is also monotonically biased towards limited crops, especially rice and wheat in the green revolution period. Of the Indian total cultivated area, more than 30 percent of the area was under wheat and rice. Demand for high-value foodstuffs is on the rise in the 1990s due to increasing population, high-income growth, changing food consumption habits, awareness of the high nutritional value, and great emphasis on value addition and change in export policy. In this problem of background, the central government set an objective to double farmers’ income by 2022-23 to promote farmers’ livelihood, reduce farming distress and fetch parity between farmers’ income and non-agricultural professions. According to Niti Aayog, doubling real farmers’ income till 2022-23 as the base year of 2015-16 requires a 10.41% annual growth rate in farmers’ income. Therefore, strong methods are needed to harness all potential sources of growth in farmers’ income. To attain doubling the farmers’ income, there are three possible ways available (i) new development initiatives, (ii) new technology adoption, and (iii) policy reforms in agriculture. This research study is one of the possible ways to examine the divers of crop diversification and its impact on farmers’ income

Highlights

• Crop diversification driver provides a scope of untapped farmers’ income capacity.
• Growth rate analysis gives a way to reallocate production to more productive uses.
• Herfindahl index indicates the area of crop diversification and doubling farmers’ income.
• Econometric analysis of this research provides the factors responsible for doubling farmers’ income by 2022.