Sustainable agricultural development and rural poverty in India

The share of agriculture in GDP of Indian economy has been declining to 15% now due to high growth rates of industrial and service sectors but the economic and social parameter is beyond any comparison in India. The paper deals in the spatial pattern of sustainable agricultural development as Composite Index of Agricultural Development (CIAD) and its relationship with rural poverty in India. The regression analysis leads us to the various findings through model building and analyzing the whole structure of poverty in India. The models represent various indicators of rural poverty and sustainable agricultural development and justify the relationship in between the two. The striking picture here 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 population (having high percentage of SC & ST population), along with poor irrigational facility, which has acted as a constraint in the wide spread technological diffusion in agriculture. In these states, agriculture still is of subsistence nature and has not been commercialized. With the lowest composite scores, Assam too, suffers from unfavorable conditions for agriculture, in terms of land availability, irrigation facility, high concentration of ST population, remote setting and low level of interaction with developed regions, all this acting as an obstacle in achieving high level of agricultural development. The analysis of rural poverty and related indices reveals higher concentration of rural poor in the slow -growing , backward states like Bihar , Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. In these states, there still exist semi-feudal agrarian relation in the rural sector, with high concentration of scheduled caste and scheduled tribes. As against this, the incidence of 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. India must strive to break the cycle of poverty, credit burden and environmental degradation and improve the livelihood of farmers.