IMPACT OF IRRIGATION ON AGRICULTURAL GROWTH AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION IN INDIA

Poverty in rural India has declined substantially in recent decades. The percentage of the rural population living below the poverty line fluctuated between 50 and 65 percent prior to the mid-1960s, but then declined steadily to about one-third of the rural population by the early 1990s. The purpose of this research is to find out the effective causes of the decline (changes) in rural poverty in India. The research uses state-level data to estimate an econometric model that permits calculation of the percentage change in the dependent variation (Changes in the incidence of poverty by state, head-count ratio measure,) when the independent variable (rural development expenditure, road density in rural India, percentage of cropped area irrigated, percentages of villages electrified, percentage of rural population that is literate, percentage of cropped area sown with high-yielding varieties, by state) changes by one percent. This is done by using annual time series data from 1970 to 1993 for 14 major states of India. We have used pooled panel regression technique for the study. Among all the variables selected for analyzing the poverty measure in this study, we have found that irrigation has the strongest influence in explaining the reduction in poverty.