Where jackfruit grows in India

Jackfruit grows best in the warm, humid parts of India: the west coast and Western Ghats, the southern states, the east and the north-east. Kew's World Checklist (read via GBIF) lists India as its native range and lists Assam, the eastern Himalaya, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and many tropical countries as places where it was introduced. Flowers of India says it is most probably native to the rainforests of the Western Ghats. A 2023 article in ICAR's Indian Horticulture magazine (Karunakaran and colleagues) calls India the motherland of jackfruit and says it is widely grown in Assam, Tripura, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, the Himalayan foothills, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

ICRAF gives its limits as 0–1,600 m altitude and 1,000–2,400 mm of rain a year, and says the tree needs a warm, humid climate with rain spread through the year for good crops. It adds that jackfruit copes with cooler weather and some frost better than its relatives, but tolerates neither drought nor flooding. KAU describes it as a crop of warm, humid places up to 1,000 m, and warns that a rising water table or poorly aerated soil harms it; TNAU grows it on the plains and up to about 1,200 m. For soil, ICRAF prefers deep, well-drained alluvial, sandy loam or clay loam with a pH of about 5–7.5, though the tree also grows on poorer gravelly or lateritic soils.

How it suits each part of India (our assessment, based on these sources):

• Grows well: the west coast, the southern peninsula, the east coast, the east and the north-east, on well-drained land.
• With care: the northern plains and central India, where young trees need water in the dry summer and a cover on frosty nights; and the Himalayan foothills where frost is light.
• Marginal: the north-west dry zone. Rainfall there is well below the range ICRAF gives, summers are hot and dry and winter nights can freeze, so plant only where you can water regularly and protect the young tree, and expect a smaller crop.
• Not suitable: the higher Himalaya, and any low spot where water stands after rain.

How to recognise jackfruit

A jackfruit tree is easiest to recognise by its huge, spiny green fruits hanging straight from the trunk and thick branches; ICRAF describes an evergreen tree 8–25 m tall with a dense, dome-shaped crown.

• Leaves: alternate, thick and leathery, glossy dark green above and paler below, 4–25 cm long (ICRAF). Leaves on young shoots can have 2 or 3 lobes; on mature branches they are whole and oval (ICRAF, Flowers of India).
• Flowers: tiny, packed into separate male and female spikes on the same tree; ICRAF gives male spikes as 3–10 cm long and female spikes as 5–15 cm. They grow on short, stout twigs from the trunk and large branches (Flowers of India). In a 2014–16 study at ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru (a University of Horticultural Sciences, Bagalkot thesis), the main flowering season ran from November to April.
• Fruit: the largest of all tree-borne fruits (Flowers of India). ICRAF gives 20–100 cm in length and 4.5–50 kg in weight, with a green to yellowish rind covered in hard, pointed or blunt spines; inside are sweet yellow bulbs, each around one seed. ICRAF says the fruit matures 80–160 days after flowering.
• Bark and latex: greyish-brown, rough and somewhat scaly; every living part oozes a sticky white latex when cut (ICRAF).
• Look-alike: breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), called vilayati kathal (विलायती कटहल) in Hindi. Flowers of India describes its leaves as deeply cut into lobes and its skin as patterned with hexagon-like discs, while mature jackfruit leaves are whole and its rind is spiny (ICRAF).