Seeking District-Level Data on Rice and Millet Land Use in India

[Linfeng Li]

Hi all,

I'm writing to ask for pointers on Rice% and Millet% land-use data for all districts in India.

Currently, for rice, I have identified a potential source from the article "New district-level maps of rice cropping in India" that leads to the India Rice Cropping Maps on EOS Earthdata. According to the data guide, it provides specific data on plant rotation land use for both rice and millet from the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Question 1: Can this source be reliably used for calculating both Rice% and Millet% given the coverage of millet as a crop type in the land rotation data?

Question 2: Is there a more recent data source available for agricultural land use at the district level?

Additionally, I have received a historical dataset titled "India Districts 1966.xlsx", which appears to be manually encoded from survey books found in a university library, and includes columns such as District1966, DistTotalRiceCultivatedArea1966, and TotalCultivatedArea1966.

Question 3: Has anyone also come across this data, and know the actual source of it?

Question 4: Does anyone know of a similar dataset that includes data on millet percentages from the 1960s or earlier?

Thank you for any guidance or pointers you can provide.

All the best,

-Linfeng