Agricultural Productivity Growth in India

The case of Indian agricultural performance was impressive. The food production and increases in productivity are essential for meeting the growing demands for food in the future. There is widespread opinion that this growing demand can be met by increased use of inputs or increases in agricultural productivity. Productivity growth of agriculture in India over the past four decades was the result of a combination of factors such as new incentives to farmers offered by the government who considered them as autonomous economic agents, and physical factors such as land, labour, capital (in the form of machines, working animals, irrigation system, and so on), and intermediate inputs such as fertilizer. Indian agricultural growth has been less dependent on the conventional inputs of capital. Capital was computed as the sum of the value of agricultural machinery, farm equipment and tools, transport equipment in farm business, land improvements, investments in private and public irrigation, and farm houses in Indian agriculture. As the growth of agriculture increases the importance of conventional inputs of capital becomes lesser in comparison to modern inputs of capital. Since mid 1960s, a package of modern inputs of capital such as high yield variety seeds, chemical fertilizers, tractor etc. has been continuously used with increasing trend in Indian agriculture. This was main cause of the remarkable growth in output of agriculture during 1970s and 1980s decades. This paper is aimed at analyzing the impact of some production variables (input) on agricultural productivity growth (output) in Indian agriculture from 1969-70 to 2005-06. The question here is whether or not these different variables have an impact on agricultural production.