Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2018 in the subject Agrarian Studies, , language: English, abstract: In the recent past, India has made an impressive progress in achieving self sufficiency in food grains. However, efforts to increase the production of oilseeds have not brought any perceptible change in per capita availability of oil to predominantly vegetarian population of our country. The domestic demand for vegetable oils and fats has also been rising rapidly at an increasing rate due to increase in per capita income and increase standard. The present per capita annual consumption of edible oil is 14.4 kg and in 2030 it will likely to be 19.1 kg. India will continue to depend on imports of edible oils even in the coming decades. The domestic production of edible oils is projected to be about 12 million tonnes by 2020 and 19 million tonnes by 2030. These facts clearly emphasize urgent need to achieve substantial and sustained growth in production of oilseeds.