PERFORMANCE OF INDIAN AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT: NEED FOR REFORMS

Abstract

The agriculture sector is playing an important role in India. Agriculture has always been the backbone of the Indian economy. The significance of agriculture in India arises from the fact that the development in agriculture is an essential condition for the development of the national economy. To achieve this, the Government has been launching a number of plans and programmes all through after independence. But, the first major success came out in the form of the green revolution in the mid sixities. Green revolution has already proved that the achievement of productivity is technically feasible. Therefore, the paper attempts to examine the performance of Indian agriculture and livelihood impact on agricultural development in India. The paper finds clearly that the adoption of new economic policy is the main factor, which determines the productivity of agriculture in the Indian economy. However, it has to be supported by other important agricultural inputs like production, investment etc. However, the new technology that was successfully implemented in the case of major food grains, basically rice and wheat; need to be extended to other food grains and also to the non-food grain crops. Similarly, there is a need to extend the new technology in agriculture to the dry land farming systems also. However, we should be very cautious in over using the ecologically incompatible inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides