India's post‐green‐revolution agricultural performance: what is driving growth?

Abstract

Following a period of poor performance in the 1990s, India's agricultural growth rate has reaccelerated in the 2000s. Some believe the reacceleration has been a product of intensified investment, which in turn has spurred yield growth. Others suggest it is because India's newly wealthy citizens have demanded greater product diversification. To examine these hypotheses, we use growth accounting techniques in conjunction with more complete agricultural production data than in past studies to construct state, regional, and national output, input, and total factor productivity quantity indexes, which can be decomposed into their underlying sources. Sectoral performance evaluation suggests that, since 1980, output growth has diffused away from the northern "grain belt" and toward high-value agriculture in traditionally less-productive regions. Productivity growth, rather than resource use, has accounted for these geographical and intensity shifts. The growth burst has not, as the literature has primarily argued, been uniquely explainable by yield growth or product diversification but by a variety of factors, including area expansion. For example, the contributions of irrigation technologies permitting double-cropping have until now been largely ignored. JEL classifications: O13, O30, Q10These quantity indexes afford spatial and temporal performance examinations of India's agricultural sector in a post-Green Revolution time frame, a period capturing its recent production shift toward high-valued commodities. Our findings suggest that as India has transitioned out of the Green Revolution, the agricultural sector's TFP growth has diffused away from the northern "grain belt" and become a national phenomenon, led by accelerated production growth in horticulture and livestock products. We also find that India's recent agricultural growth was lifted by a balanced set of growth benefits arising not only from advancing yields-as argued by Chand and Parappurathu (2012)-and product diversification-as argued by Singh and Pal (2010) and Binswanger-Mkhize and d'Souza (2012)-but also by area expansion. Indeed, the contribution of area expansion, reflecting the role of irrigation, has been largely neglected in the literature. Yet, we find it has substantially contributed to India's recent agricultural growth.

Evaluating research and education performance in Indian agricultural development

“…In the South, on the other hand, factor productivity has benefitted from both a relatively rapid out‐shift in the technical frontier and in the average farmer's ability to keep up with it. Research stations are producing the kinds of innovations farmers want, as evidenced by the relatively rapid rate of formal technical change, and farmers are economizing on inputs as they include more higher‐valued horticulture and animal products into their output mix, as evidenced by the high efficiency gains amid declining labor, animal capital, and near stagnant land expansion exhibited in the present analysis and the production trends exhibited in Rada ().…”

“…Northern producers have specialized ever more deeply in grains while benefitting from strong state‐level support as well as proximity to ICAR research institutes, which innovate on and maintain the fertilizer‐irrigation‐grain technologies the region relies on (Beintema et al. ; Evenson et al., ; Pal et al., ; Rada, ; Pal and Singh ). Its weak TFP record has primarily been in the weakness of its efficiency growth, perhaps because of the input intensivity of its production practices and the paucity of any new‐commodity development.…”

“…Production data are drawn from Rada (). In these data, Bihar is grouped with Jharkhand to form Old Bihar, Madhya Pradesh with Chhattisgarh to form Old Madhya Pradesh (Old MP), and Uttar Pradesh with Uttaranchal to form Old Uttar Pradesh (Old UP).…”

“…In contrast, India's farm production patterns have been changing dramatically. In the 1980–2008 period, in particular, production growth in the North was driven by grains and animal products, in the Center by oilseeds, and in the South, East, and West by high‐value horticulture and animal products, complemented in the latter by cotton and irrigated wheat (Gulati and Ganguly, ; Rada, ; Singh and Pal, ). With this apparent discrepancy between an inflexible policy and a trending output mix in mind, we ask in this article whether Indian agricultural growth might have benefitted from more flexible, regionally differentiated education and research public investments.…”

The productivity of agricultural credit in India

“…See Rada () for a recent analysis of TFP in India. Results suggest renewed growth in aggregate TFP growth despite a slowdown in cereal grain yield growth.…”