A woman labourer harvests marigold flowers at a field, in Chikkamagaluru district, Karnataka, May 29, 2026.

India’s floriculture sector is, by every headline metric, in full bloom. The area under flower cultivation has touched a record 4 lakh hectares in 2025-26, recovering sharply from a low of 2.82 lakh hectares in 2021-22. Gross value added from the sector has surged from ₹39,287 crore in 2019-20 to ₹51,643 crore in 2023-24. The numbers suggest an industry firing on all cylinders.

Yet travel to the mist-covered hills of Arunachal Pradesh, and a very different story unfolds. In 2009-10, the state cultivated 1,200 hectares of cut flowers, producing 2,860 tonnes annually, enough to rank it among the country’s top two anthurium producers, trailing only Mizoram. It was a remarkable ascent for a state where commercial floriculture had barely existed a few years earlier.

Today, that bloom has all but vanished. Farmers have drifted to other crops, and the anthurium, once the pride of Arunachal’s hills, has migrated south and east, finding new enthusiasts in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Bihar, West Bengal, and Kerala.

The arc of anthurium in Arunachal is a parable for the central paradox of India’s flower economy: a sector setting records at the national level even as it quietly retreats across much of the Northeast, a region once seen as its next great frontier.

That paradox has a structural explanation. The national boom is being driven not by new frontiers opening up but by old ones holding firm; farmers in established growing states expanding acreage despite mounting pressure from urbanisation and surging real estate values, racing to extract more from the land before it is swallowed by spreading cities. It is growth born as much of necessity as of opportunity.

Moving on to more lucrative crops

In the Northeast, by contrast, flower cultivation is losing ground to more immediately lucrative crops, hampered further by infrastructure gaps and the absence of reliable market linkages, leaving a region blessed with altitude, biodiversity, and climate sitting largely on the sidelines of an industry boom it once helped seed.

Sikkim, a leading grower of orchid, reported the total area under flower cultivation at 242 hectares and production of 16,509 tonnes in 2025-26, which has been maintained at the same level as a decade ago. In 2015-16 also, the area and output were same. On the other hand, the area under flowers in Mizoram has shrunk to 50 hectares in 2025-26 from 240 hectare in 2017-18.

Nagaland, on the other, has done exceptionally well as area under floriculture reached 1,190 hectares in 2023-24 from only 70 hectare in 2015-16, official data show.

India started collecting area, production and other data on flowers only from 1993-94. Even the production number of cut flowers was added to the number from 2012-13 and until then it was only loose flowers. The share of floriculture in overall horticulture production, which reached a record 377.78 million tonnes and higher than even foodgrain output, has jumped from 0.76 per cent in 2014-15 to 1.2 per cent in 2025-26.

Among the top states in flower production during 2023-24, the highest share in national output was recorded by Tamil Nadu (19 per cent), followed by Madhya Pradesh (14 per cent), Karnataka (12 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (11 per cent) and West Bengal (10 per cent).

Published on June 14, 2026