Sustainable Agricultural Development and Rural Poverty in India

Income distribution in India is largely divided into two major sectors- i.e. .primary and secondary. The percentage share of agriculture to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) has seen a steady decline in recent years and currently stands at 15%. This is attributable to the high growth rates in the industrial and services sectors of the economy. This chapter addresses the spatial pattern of sustainable agricultural development as a Composite Index of Agricultural Development (CIAD) and its relationship with rural poverty in India. The regression analysis leads to various findings through model building and analyzing the overall structure of poverty in India. The models represent various indicators of rural poverty and sustainable agricultural development and justify the relationship between the two. The vital feature is that the states having vast agricultural potential, such as Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Orissa have remained at the lower rung of the development ladder due to their geographical configuration and social composition of the population (i.e. having a high percentage of scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) in the population) along with poor irrigational facilities, which has been a constraint to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation in the agricultural sector. In these states, agriculture is still of subsistence nature and has not been commercialized. With the lowest composite scores, Assam suffers from unfavorable conditions for agriculture which are land availability, irrigation facility, high concentration of ST population, remote setting and low level of interaction with the more developed regions of the country. All this has acted as a major constraint to achieving a high a level of agricultural development. The CIAD model of rural poverty and related indices reveal that there is a higher concentration of rural poor in the slow-growing states like Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. In these states, there still exists semi-feudal agrarian relation in the rural areas with a high concentration of SC and ST. On the contrary poverty is much lower in the prosperous regions of Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala etc, resulting into relatively higher variability in regional distribution of rural poverty. These statistics demonstrate the need for India to urgently strive to break the cycle of poverty, credit burden and environmental degradation and improve the livelihood of farmers.