Agriculture-Industry Interlinkages: Some Theoretical and Methodological Issues in the Indian Context

The inter-relationship between agriculture and industry has been a long debated issue in most of the developing countries. In the Indian context, the issue has acquired interest since the industrial stagnation of the mid 1960s. Over the years the Indian economy has undergone a structural change in its sectoral composition: from a primary agro-based economy during 1970s, the economy has emerged as predominant in the service sector since the 1990s. This structural change and uneven pattern of growth of agriculture, industry and services sector in the post reforms period is likely to appear substantial changes in the production and demand linkages among various sectors, and in turn, could have significant implication for the growth and development process of the economy. This has triggered a renewed interest in studying the inter-relationship between agriculture and industry. The present paper tries to address some of the theoretical and methodological issues in analyzing the agriculture-industry interlinkages in the Indian context.