Determinants of Agricultural Productivity in Rajasthan, India: The Impact of Inputs, Technology, and Context on Land Productivity

Abstract

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the sources of agricultural development in such regions of India as Punjab-Haryana and Tamilnadu. Yet other states also merit notice because of their special natural and social characteristics, unique agrarian patterns, and less publicized achievements. Thus, we believe it would be useful to investigate the sources of variation in agricultural productivity, defined as the average value of crop output per hectare of arable land, in Rajasthan's 26 districts. (A district in India is an important political and administrative unit below the state level and over villages and tahsils. In Rajasthan, a district's population will typically number 1 million or more.) Dissatisfied as we were with the limited range of explanatory variables that could be brought into standard production function analysis, we followed an alternative method here that seems to yield a superior understanding of important relationships. Located in the west, Rajasthan is on the average poor, dry, and sparsely populated.' Bajra, a millet grown on unirrigated land, is planted on the greatest acreage; overall, nine-tenths of the arable land is devoted to food crops. Sugarcane and cotton are the major cash crops. Much of the west is desert, but the eastern areas receive adequate rainfall for agriculture, although the monsoon is highly variable. Most major towns, including Jaipur, the capital, are found in the more densely populated east. The Aravalli range runs south to north through the state, screening the monsoon rains from the dry desert and near-desert areas bordering Pakistan. Ganganagar district, wedged against Punjab and Haryana in the north, enjoys a canal-based agricultural regime that differentiates it from