2.2.1. Land-Use Data

Focusing on the cultivation of rice during the monsoon season, the district-wise data on land use was collected from Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture and Family Welfare, Government of India from the year 2000 to 2014. From this, data on the area under paddy sown during the *Kharif* season and the net area sown under all crops was collected. Net area sown, defined as the total area which is sowed at least once in the same year, was used for the analysis. The dataset provides details on the area sown with rice crop by seasons, which are broadly categorised as autumn, winter and summer. The main rice growing season in India is the *Kharif* season and roughly 84% of the rice is grown during this season. The sowing time of winter (*Kharif*) rice is in June–July which is when monsoon arrives and it is harvested between the months of November–January). Given that the focus of this study is on the *Kharif* season, when most of the flooding happens in India, the land-use data on area during *Kharif* season was used.

**Figure 3.** (**a**,**b**) MODIS TERRA satellite data taken on 22 September 2010; (**c**,**d**) are the flood inundation extent covering the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India. Source: IWMI.

Furthermore, the study considers only 17 states for analysis, which are Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal. These 17 states represent approximately 89% of the rice-growing area across the Indian states. The states of Maharashtra and Gujarat are considerably big, both in terms of their economic capacity and agricultural share; however, rice is not the primary grown crop in these regions owing to their agro-climatic conditions which are better suited for growing cotton, sugar cane, millet and so on. Overall, the rice growing area is 5% for both the states combined. The remaining states that were not included in the study were excluded either because district level land use data was not available, for states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Manipur and Telangana; or because average area used for growing rice was negligible, such as for the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir.
