This book presents an extensive study on India’s agricultural and nonfarm sectors, examining prices, investments and policies, and suggesting various essential technological changes. It offers appropriate financial, institutional, and policy frameworks that can help to sustain agricultural growth and augment farmers’ incomes across geographical locations. Further, it addresses agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction through multiple pathways that also tackle varied geographical locations, making it a highly useful guide to understanding the changing contours in agriculture and rural areas across the country and among rural households with various social and economic backgrounds.

Commemorative volume published on the 75th birth anniversary of V.S. Vyas, economist from Rajasthan, India; most of the papers presented at a seminar held at Jaipur in February 2008.

Using the decennial All-India Debt and Investment Survey from 1981-82 to 2012-13, this paper delves into the spatial and temporal trends in private fixed capital expenditure and its composition, among rural households in India. We also assess its relationship with public investment in agriculture. Amidst sizeable ups and downs, the magnitude and rate of growth in private investment in agriculture has gained momentum from 2000s except in Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. An increasing preference of farmers to invest in residential land and buildings, and that at the cost of asset formation in farm business, is evident in agriculturally advanced states. Within agriculture, relatively higher investments in land improvement, machinery-implements, tractors, and livestock are identified over the period. Importantly, such investments are positively influenced by public investments in agriculture and irrigation in the high and low income states and also by public spending on input subsidy in the middle and low income states. An increase in public expenditure that is well targeted and is commensurate with farmers’ investment portfolio would reinforce a complementary relation between the two across-the-board. The impact of terms of trade on private investment though positive turns out to be statistically insignificant. Land acts as a constraint, indicating need for policy interventions that augment crop yield and can bring remunerative prices to farmers. A continued effort to improve the outreach of formal financial institutions for credit is warranted for higher private capital formation.

This open access book provides an evidence-based roadmap for revitalising Indian agriculture while ensuring that the growth process is efficient, inclusive, and sustainable, and results in sustained growth of farmers’ incomes. The book, instead of looking for global best practices and evaluating them to assess the possibility of replicating these domestically, looks inward at the best practices and experiences within Indian states, to answer questions such as -- how the agricultural growth process can be speeded up and made more inclusive, and financially viable; are there any best practices that can be studied and replicated to bring about faster growth in agriculture; does the prior hypothesis that rapid agricultural growth can alleviate poverty faster, reduce malnutrition, and augment farmers’ incomes stand? To answer these questions, the book follows four broad threads -- i) Linkage between agricultural performance, poverty and malnutrition; ii) Analysing the historical growth performance of agricultural sector in selected Indian states; iii) Will higher agricultural GDP necessarily result in higher incomes for farmers; iv) Analysing the current agricultural policy environment to evaluate its efficiency and efficacy, and consolidate all analysis to create a roadmap. These are discussed in 12 chapters, which provide a building block for the concluding chapter that presents a roadmap for revitalising Indian agriculture while ensuring growth in farmers’ incomes.

This open access book brings together varying perspectives for transformational change needed in India’s agriculture and allied sectors. Stressing the need of thinking for a post-Green Revolution future, the book promotes approaching this change through eight broad areas, indicating the policy shifts needed to meet the challenges for the coming decade (2021-2030). The book comprises of ten contributions. Apart from the overview chapter on transformational change and the concluding chapter on pathways for 2030, there are eight thematic chapters on topics such as transforming Indian agriculture, dietary diversity for nutritive and safe food; climate crisis and risk management; water in agriculture; pests, pandemics, preparedness and biosecurity natural farming; agroecology and biodiverse futures; science, technology and innovation in agriculture; and structural reforms and governance. The writing style of these papers written by technical experts is forward-looking—not merely an analysis of what has been and why it was so, but what ought to be. This is an essential reading for those interested in agriculture, food and nutrition sectors of India, and more so their interconnectedness.

Agriculture sector still dominates the Indian economic scene by providing livelihood to majority of the population. In most of the developing countries including India, agricultural growth is a precondition for economic development. Agriculture and allied activities contributed nearly 50 percent to India’s national income. Around 72 percent of total working population was engaged in agriculture. Inspite of an impressive rate of growth in the GCFA, its share in the GCF in the economy has been found to be declining. Although some improvement was observed in the share of GCFA in the GCF of economy in 2001-02, at 8.65 per cent, it again fell to 6.96 per cent in 2010-11. Capital formation is usually defined as an addition to the stock of productive equipment’s over time. The terms ‘capital formation’ and ‘investment’ are used interchangeably though have some distinction. But at the present stage of development of Indian agriculture, an assessment of capital formation in the agriculture sector may miss many important items of investment which are not accounted. This is because of the fact that, majority of Indian agriculturists being poor subsistence farmers for whom farming is not a business enterprise but a mode of living, Capital investments on the farm generally take place through small bits of acquisitions and activities which lead to an improvement in their productive capacity. Sustained investment on productive assets in agriculture is a pre-requisite for augmenting agricultural growth.

Presenting Professor V. S. Vyas's approach to the major national and global challenges facing Indian agriculture, this book makes available his research and writing on how policy interventions, technological changes, and institutional developments are impacting the economy of those directly dependent on it for their livelihood.

The present study analyzes temporal and spatial trends in public expenditure on agriculture and irrigation in India. It links sub-period growth performance with expenditure based on structural breaks. The analysis pertains to the period between 1992/1993 and 2019/2020. This is a period that has witnessed a stagnation, and even a decrease in public expenditure in the agricultural sector and a resulting deceleration in productivity growth, which was then followed by a revival in both expenditure and output. Significantly expenditure on subsidies of key inputs, viz. fertilizer, irrigation, and power, however, has not incentivized farmers to increase output and productivity to achieve a higher rate of growth. Empirical findings based on the first-difference regression analysis confirm that agricultural growth is determined by public expenditure on agriculture and irrigation; across the states, however, input subsidies alone are shown to be less, or not at all, efficient. Funds to agriculture and irrigation should be increased in proportion to their contribution to the state domestic product, and input subsidies should be rationalized by weighing their positive welfare effects against their cost to the exchequer.

In this paper, we study the transformation process Indian agriculture exhibited in the recent past, studying its policy implications. Between the years 2005-06 and 2015-16, more than 52 million workers left agriculture, which did not have any effect on agricultural output due to productivity improvements. We estimate the contribution of productivity growth and structural change in agriculture to national productivity growth during 1981-2016. We estimate differentials in agricultural productivity and in their ability to contribute to the structural change process for 21 major states of India. Using revised employment estimates, we trace major changes during the pre-reforms (before 1991) and post-reforms periods. Results show that in the pre-reforms period, the impact of productivity improvements in agriculture on agricultural output was equated by the new workforce entering into this sector, leading to a stagnant labor productivity trend. The labor-shift from agriculture during the early years of the post-reforms period, which increased further in the next decade, has led to a consistent rise in agricultural productivity. In the absence of reforms and the associated labor shift, the productivity growth in Indian agriculture would have been much lower. A similar labor shift during the last decade has not affected agricultural output, which has risen more rapidly. This result holds true for almost all states studied. There exists a positive relation between labor-shift and agricultural output in a cluster of states. Decomposition results indicate ‘within-sector’ productivity growth is the major source of overall growth, with a rising contribution of ‘structural change’. Studying the sources of growth across states offers new scope to achieve inter-sectoral productivity convergence.