The districts in each state of the country have been divided from time to time based on political, socio-economic, linguistic and other factors. There were 313 districts in the 16 states in 1966 (excluding northeastern states (except Assam) and Jammu and Kashmir).

By 2015 four new states were created from the 16 states to make it 20 states and the number of districts in the 20 states increased to 571. To ensure continuity in the database for time series analysis and for spatial and temporal analysis using GIS maps, a methodology was devised for apportioning the data of the newly formed districts back to its parent district, i.e., 1966 district boundaries.

Thus, the database is divided into two datasets: Apportioned database with 1966 district boundaries and unapportioned database with current district boundaries (in our case upto 2015-16). The apportioned database includes data from 1966 to 2015-16 while the unapportioned database spans 1990 to 2015-16.

The data on environment variables (AET, PET, PPT, etc) is available only for unapportioned data from 1956 to 2015. Besides the two data sets, another set of variables are included under ‘Additional data’, and includes data files on season wise crop area and production, break up of fruits and vegetables area and production by crop, night lights, agricultural credit etc. These data are unapportioned and the years covered are for recent years and are also not uniform across data files.

The current update of the district level database from 2010 onwards is being carried out under an ICRISAT–TCI (Tata Cornell Institute of Agriculture and Nutrition) joint collaborative project on “Updating the meso-level database for India and developing an interactive tool for public access and use”. A unique feature of this update besides data generation and maintenance is the development of an interactive user friendly web tool for easy data access, retrieval, and storage of the data. Visualization of graphs and spatial maps will be an additional feature of the web tool.

Historically since 1980 the district level database is being maintained by ICRISAT with data going back to 1966 with funding support under various bilateral projects and supported by several donor agencies and intuitions. For example, the World Bank, System-wide Livestock Program (SLP-CGIAR), BMGF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in collaboration with the National Institute of Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NIAP) a think tank of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), New Delhi. A number of research papers/articles have been published using this database by lead research institute in India and elsewhere.

This work was undertaken as part of the CGIAR Research Programs on Grain Legumes and Dryland Crereals (GLDC) led by ICRISAT and Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Funding support for this web tool was provided by Tata -Cornell Institute (TCI) and CGIAR Research Program on Grain legumes and Dryland cereals (GLDC).

This web tool has not gone through IFPRI’s standard peer-review procedure. The data avaliable here has been collated from different sources by ICRISAT. While great effort was taken to obtain high-quality data, the accuracy or reliability of the data is not guaranteed or warranted in any way. The data are provided ‘as is’ and in no event shall ICRISAT, GLDC, PIM, TCI and CGIAR doesn’t bear responsibility for any nonconformities, defects and errors in the data and be liable for any damages resulting from use of the data.