Name: Parmod Kumar
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 91-115

Agricultural Performance in the Last Three Decades
The widely held perception that the agricultural sector, broadly defined to include forestry and fishery, has not been part of India’s growth transition in the recent past is corroborated by data. Agriculture has languished at a time when the trend rate of growth in the other sectors of the economy has been rising. The divergence in growth rates of overall and agricultural GDP has persisted and even widened after the year 2000 (Figure 1), though volatility in agricultural growth rates has fallen since then. The GDP growth rate of agriculture peaked in the 1980s (i.e. 1980–89) at above 4 per cent, while overall GDP grew at a rate of 5.6 per cent during the same time period. Growth rate in agricultural GDP came down to 3.4 per cent in the 1990s (i.e. 1990-99) and further to 2.7 per cent during the decade of 2000s (i.e. 2000-09). In comparison, the overall GDP jumped from 5.7 per cent in the 1990s to 7.4 per cent during the 2000s. Thus, while the overall economy accelerated, the agricultural sector decelerated. As a result, the gap between the growth of agriculture, including allied sectors, and that of the rest of the economy continues to widen. This has led to a steeper fall in the share of agriculture and allied sectors in the rest of the economy, although no major changes have taken place in the employment structure.