SECTION I: AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT: CHALLENGES AND INNOVATIONS

SECTION II: AGRICULTURE INPUTS

SECTION III: AGRICULTURE PRODUCTIVITY AND DIVERSIFICATION

SECTION IV: TRANSPORTATION ISSUES, LABOR MARKETS AND FARMER INCOMES IN INDIAN AGRICULTURE

SECTION V: SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

The agriculture sector is one of the most important components of the Indian economy. It has been the backbone of the economy for ages and has gone through a paradigm shift from subsistence agriculture in the first half of the last century to a gradual commercial farming approach through crop diversification. Despite strong footings and performances, the growth of the agriculture sector in India has been fluctuating for a long period due to lack of post-harvest infrastructure, poor utilization of land, low value-addition, poor facility of packaging and distribution. The average growth in GDP from agriculture over the last more than one decade has been around 2.5 per cent only. Over the past seven decades, the country has successfully transformed itself from a food deficit economy into a self-sufficient economy. The continuous rise in annual aggregate food grains production has helped India to not only meet its increasing demand but also in pushing the exports to some extent. It also helped the country to accumulate a substantial quantity of food grains as buffer stocks to cope with any natural calamities. The rise in food grains production, despite a decline in the area under cultivation for total food grains, partly explains the rise in farm productivity. Data also suggest that over the period time the availability and accessibility of food grains have improved. But still, the productivity is constrained by various distortions in product and factor markets and government policy interventions must enhance the markets to be pro-farmers. Increasing production and productivity are keys to the agricultural growth process. Equally important is to provide post-production infrastructure including fair markets. It is important to provide better infrastructure for connectivity, storage and credit which can remove geographical isolation of markets and can help in bringing the farmer closer to consumers and, possibly enhance the bargaining capacity of the farmer. There are constant efforts to improve agricultural infrastructures across the country but the requirements of investments are phenomenally very high considering the vastness of agricultural production processes and, therefore, public and private investments need to be pushed. A preliminary look at the information on agricultural investment as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shows a decline from 3.9 per cent in 1980 to 2.2 per cent in 2014-15. Contrary to this, input subsidies during this period have increased from 2.8 per cent to 8 per cent of GDP. This model of sustaining agriculture on subsidy cannot be a viable agricultural growth model and accordingly a big push in the investment is a necessary condition for agricultural development. This volume is an outcome of academic deliberations undertaken by The Indian Econometric Society (TIES) and the Jaipur Think Tank led by Dr Vijay Vir Singh to comprehensively understand the emerging issues in Indian agriculture. This exercise was converted into a two days national seminar organized by TIES in collaboration with St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur, on “Agriculture and Rural Management: Prospects and Emerging Issues