Review Article GROWTH AND INSTABILITY IN AREA, PRODUCTION AND PRODUCTIVITY OF SOYABEAN IN INDIA *Santosh Kumar 1 , P.K. Singh 1 , D. Rathi 2 , S.B Nahatkar 2 , V.K. Choudhary 1 and S.K. Parey 1 1 ICAR-Directorate of Weed Research, Jabalpur-482004 (MP), India 2 College of Agriculture, JNKVV, Jabalpur E-mail: santosh.ageco@gmail.com (*Corresponding Author) Abstract: This paper analyzes the growth and instability in terms of area, production and productivity of soybean crop in India. For the analysis purpose, used the secondary data from 1996-97 to 2015-16 which is further divided into four sub-periods, have been examined. The growth was examined by compound annual growth rate and contribution of area and productivity towards output growth by decomposition analysis. The study concludes that, the relative changes in area, production and productivity under soybean were not uniform as compared to the base year. Maximum relative change in the area was found to be 15.51% in the year 2004-05 and maximum decrease (-) 6.88% in the year 2014-15, whereas maximum increase in production and productivity were found to be 67.98 and 56.56%, respectively in the year 2003-04, and maximum decrease in the production and productivity were (-) 25.42 and (-) 27.68%, respectively in the year 2000-01. The overall compound growth rate of area and production of soybean were found to be positive and significant at the 1 per cent level of significance and productivity found positive but not significant during 1996-97 to 2015-16. In concern to the instability was found to be low in case of area under soybean as compared to production and productivity over the study period. The area effect was found to be 100.75%, whereas yield and interaction effect were (-) 0.41 and (-) 0.34% during study period. The degree of relationship between area and production of soybean crop was measured over the period is 0.83 which is significant at 1% level of significance. Keyword: Soybean, compound growth rate, instability, decomposition analysis, variability. INTRODUCTION Soybean is the second important oilseed crops grown in different parts of India after groundnut. Soybean has emerged as golden bean of 21 st century and it is largely used as oilseed. It is the single largest oilseed grown in the different agro-climatic conditions. Soybean is looked upon not merely as a means to supply food for humans and animals, but it also improves the soil fertility by fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Due to its unique qualities it is known with the name of miracle crop also. It has 18-20 per cent edible oil, 45 per cent protein with high level of amino acid. Major soybean producing countries in the world are USA, Brazil, Argentina, China and India. Globally, area under soybean cultivation is around 121 million hectares and five major International Journal of Science, Environment ISSN 2278-3687 (O) and Technology, Vol. 8, No 2, 2019, 278 – 288 2277-663X (P) Received Feb 8, 2019 * Published April 2, 2019 * www.ijset.net