Growth and Performance of Agriculture Sector in India

The growth of agriculture and allied sectors is critical for the Indian economy as about 49 percent of the population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. During the last decade and so, the agriculture sector has undergone profound changes resulting in sharp deceleration in its growth. The study has attempted to analyse growth and performance of the agriculture sector in India since 1980-81 and tries to comprehend some of the factors responsible for the deceleration in growth. The study has shown that agriculture sector has been able to show tremendous improvement in expansion of area and production of food grain and non-food grain crops. However, there are so many underlying factors responsible for slowdown of the agricultural growth. Some of the factors identified include: increase in area under non-agriculture uses, excessive dependence on rain fed farming, increase in number of agricultural labourers, reducing size of the operation holdings, over use of agri-inputs, inequity in the distribution of agriculture credit along with sharp deceleration in public gross capital formation in agriculture etc. The study pointed in order to achieve higher growth rate, there is a need to enhance the gross capital formation in agriculture sector particularly on irrigation so that more area can be brought under assured irrigation. Bringing equity in distribution of agricultural credit coupled with judicious and need-based agricultural inputs are some of the other recommendations drawn based upon the study.