A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF LIBERALIZATION ON INDIAN AGRICULTURE

India is an agrarian economy. Its share in the GDP is 15.4% in 2016-17, and about 50% of the workforce is still employed in this sector. Indian agriculture has experienced remarkable transformation due to policy changes at the national and international levels. The article entitled “A study of the impact of liberalization on Indian agriculture” provides many insightful inferences in connection to the impact of liberalization on the Indian agriculture. The article has illustrated ample evidences showing that economic reform and liberalization programme facilitates diversified economic growth. WTO-induced reforms have now come to be believed as the first step towards achieving greater openness and integration in the world trading system. Study illustrated that how reforms, followed the adoption of phase-wise liberalization since 1991, have impacted the many aspects, viz. growth rate of agricultural output, food security, nutrition, regional equity, price stability, farm income, export of agricultural goods, welfare of consumers and producers affected by changes in prices. The present work looks at the impact of liberalization on agricultural trade. Due to special attention of government, a number of policy changes have been introduced to make agricultural export more viable as well as more visible. Agreement on Agriculture, attempts to establish free and fair trade in agriculture. The main components of AoA are: market access, domestic supports and abolishing exports subsidies. Despite the encouraging result arising out of the agreements, we still observe the non-compliance of agreement by some of the member countries to their fullest. The proportion of agricultural imports to total national imports experienced a declining trend since 1998–99, the year in which it reached its peak. Moreover, there were wide inter-temporal fluctuations in exports and imports of agricultural products, and these fluctuations increased significantly during the post-WTO period relative to the pre-WTO period.