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Articles

India’s agriculture and 25 years of economic reform (1991–2016)

Vostok/Oriens '2018, №5

DOI: 10.31857/S086919080001858-0

 
During 70 years since Independence, India's agriculture has achieved great success. During the initial period, an import-substituting model of economic growth was adopted as the basis for development. In the early 1990s, when basic needs of food security were ensured, the Indian state initiated an export re-orientation. The article describes three stages of the agricultural sector development in India: 1) the stage of compensatory growth from the turn of the 1940s to the mid-1960s; 2) the stage of the “green revolution” from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s; 3) the stage of export orientation from the early 1990s to the present. The author identifies key drivers of economic growth for these stages of Indian agricultural evolution. The focus was on the results of the economic reform initiated in the early 1990s and become the starting point of the third stage of development. In the mid-2010s, 10 per cent of the gross agricultural product was exported that is four times more than in the early 1970s. India did enter the list of leading exporters not only for traditional agricultural products, but also for nontraditional goods, including fishery products, fruits, and livestock. The growth rate in the sectors producing these products was higher than the growth rate of crops production. It is in these sectors that the technology of the second “green revolution” was introduced. The article notes that the growth of food exports in India occurred against the background of large masses of hungry amounted to more than 15 per cent of the total population.

Keywords: India, agriculture, green revolution, biotechnology, import-substituting model, export orientation, economic growth, marginalization, crop farming, horticulture

Pages: С. 154–166

 
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