Three essays on Indian agricultural growth in the post-Green Revolution period

This dissertation collects three essays, each examining one aspect of Indian agricultural development and the role of the government. The first essay reviews agricultural policies since Independence providing an update to the post Green Revolution period with particular attention to policy evolution. The essay shows that policies are connected intertemporally through performance, power-group evolution, and policy-makers' aversion to unfamiliar policies. The essay studies commodity-specific reform implications of past policies through the case of rice and shows that changes are required in research organization, regional expenditures, and import policies.;The second essay studies development outside Green Revolution areas through the case of soybeans. Farmers adopted soybeans because technology went beyond the water constraint and weather uncertainty, the focus of most research in the rainfed semi-arid tropics. Research succeeded because location-specific programs had funds and built upon breakthroughs of wide mandated research bodies. Further, the essay shows that government support for processing can induce growth, but support activities are crucial. Results suggest that governments will find it difficult to engender growth from scratch because they may not identify the right areas and activities, and because they might not have the funds. More generally, the essay argues that development strategies should pay attention to producer services and intermediate inputs.;Can better educated farmers better use managerially complex growth opportunities? The third essay answers this question by grouping districts by growth opportunity: cropping pattern changes, fertilizer use, modern variety adoption, or input efficiency, and econometrically estimating the impact of education on the value of production using slope dummies for education in each group. Results show that better educated farmers better used opportunities to change cropping patterns and increase input use efficiency without being at any significant advantage in adopting new varieties or increasing fertilizer use. A major conclusion is that the government should fund extension where growth is driven by cropping pattern changes and increases in input use efficiency and not only when introducing modern varieties and inputs as and inputs as in the past.