India’s Agrarian Performance: A Comparative Analysis of UPA and NDA Regimes

The performance of India’s agrarian economy under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)-II government has been a subject of intense public debate in the last few years.Yet, a detailed study on the subject is not available. The objective of this article is to examine the overall performance of the Indian agriculture sector during the NDA-II regime compared to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime. It is found that, contrary to popular perception, the Indian agriculture sector performed pretty well during the NDA-II regime. Despite the poor climatic conditions, the growth of agricultural gross value added was equivalent to the targeted long-term growth rate of 4 percentin the NDA-II regime.The growth of production of food commodities such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, tea, milk, egg,and fish was higher in the NDA-II regime compared to the whole UPA regime.In contrast, production of sugarcane, cotton, coffee, vegetables, fruits,and meat grew at a lower rate during the NDA-II regime.Importantly, there are clear signs of diversification of food production towards high-value agricultural commodities during the NDA-II regime.There was an improvement in the productivity of cereals,pulses, oilseeds, tea,and sugarcane.The MSP of the majority of the farm products grew at a lower rate during the NDA-II regime compared to the UPA regime.Though this might have hurt the farmers and has triggered farmers’agitation, it helped to reduce the food price inflation to a significant extent compared to the UPA regime. The efficiency of agricultural credit in promoting agricultural growth has come down significantly over the yearsincluding the NDA-II regime.Thisimplies that agricultural growth during the NDA-II regime was driven by other factors, and they include higher productivity growth; improvement in the road network; increase in agricultural exports; higher overall budgetary expenditure on agriculture and allied activities, particularly by the state governmentsand targeting of fertiliser subsidy.It seems the lower growth of MSP and agricultural credit during the NDA-II regime was compensated by these other supportive measures.