| Summary: | Trends of rice, wheat, maize, <i>sorghum</i> (<i>jowar</i>) and pearl millet (<i>bazra</i>) yields of India are studied in relation to water irrigation for the period 1951 to 2012. These crop yields have been subjected to correlation with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), obtained from NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) (for 1982 to 2000) and Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra (for 2001 to 2012) to understand the linear association among them. Crop products and food inadequacy in percentage along with the average food production rate, available from FAO have been used in the present study. The present study mainly focuses on the estimation of return values of crop yields for different periods using Gumbell Extreme Value analysis. The present study is very important in the context of increased global food demands by 2050 where in many studies report that food production to be doubled by the year 2050 to meet the demands of increasing population. The main results of the study are: (i) significant positive correlations between NDVI and the crop yields during the study period; (ii) rice, maize and <i>jowar</i> yields did not show the required incremental rate while wheat and <i>bajra</i> yields are able to meet the expectations by the 2050. More efforts require to an increase of additional ~8% in the rice yields as the present growth is only ~12% and ought to be enhanced to ~20%.
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