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One of the most promising strategies to boost farmers' income in developing countries is the adoption of improved technologies, such as modern cultivars that may produce higher yields. This study aims to examine the adoption of modern cultivars in Rajasthan, one of India's northern states. Our analysis is based on a primary survey of 1,500 farmers covering four major crops: wheat, mustard, pearl millet, and gram. The study aims to identify the farmer-level constraints in adopting modern cultivars and decomposing into the elasticity of adoption probability and the use intensity. The study also attempts to assess the role of the key characteristics of cultivars in their adoption. The authors implemented McDonald and Moffitt's (1980) approach to decompose the overall elasticity into the elasticity of adoption probability and use intensity. To present cultivar-specific analysis, the authors modeled farmers' decisions to adopt top cultivars accounting for concerns regarding independence of irrelevant alternative assumption in a multinomial logistics framework. The study finds that the key policy drivers for adoption of modern cultivars are farmers' access to the Kisan Credit Card and the intensity of the extension services they receive. Further, the estimates of elasticity show that both variables are more important for adoption probability than use intensity. The cultivar-specific analysis shows that the main drivers for adoption of modern cultivars are drought (all crops), weather-related risk tolerance of cultivars (all crops), higher yield (wheat and pearl millet), better marketability and storage traits (pearl millet and gram), and pest and disease tolerance (wheat). The main driver for continuing old cultivars is taste attributes (wheat, pearl millet, and gram). Thus, the findings stress the importance of improving credit facilities for poor farmers in particular, and providing extension services to all farmers, beginning with the places where it needed the most. Moreover, breeding efforts should consider the identified traits when developing and up-grading cultivars to ensure the availability of suitable technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]