Articles by Praduman Kumar

This paper assesses the effect of monsoon droughts on the production, demand, and prices of seven major agricultural commodities - rice, sorghum, pearl millet, maize, pigeon pea, groundnut and cotton. A partial generalised equilibrium model is developed to simulate the effects of deficit rainfall on acreage, yield, production, demand, and prices of different agricultural commodities in India. It is used to project the effect of rain deficits on supply, demand, and prices of monsoon session crops.

Systems in India Socio-Economic and Policy Issues Introduction RICE-WHEAT Cropping Systems (RWCS) gained prominence from the mid- 1960s with the introduction of short- duration and high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat during mid1960s. The rotation has spread in the most fertile regions and has covered about 10 million ha in the Indo-Gangetic plains (IGP) region of India. It is more popular in the non- traditional rice growing states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, and less in traditional rice growing states of Bihar and West Bengal. The impressive performance of the system during the last three decades resulted in a quantum jump in the production of rice and wheal, which largely contributed in achieving the food self-sufficiency in India, The foodgrain production increased from about 90 million tonnes in 1964-65 to about 190 million tonnes in 1994-95, at an annual growth of little over 2.5 per cent.

Productivity and Source of Growth for Rice Praduman Kumar Mark W Rosegrant C C MAJI and T Haque(MH)have generated more heat than light, on the issue of economic returns to rice research. Their critique (EPW, September 23, 1995) of our paper 'Productivity and Sources of Growth for Rice in India' (EPW, Review of Agriculture, December 31,1994) is fundamentally wrong. The major points of MH relate to the specification of variables in the regression analysis and the conclusions of the study which according to them are erroneous and misleading. In social sciences one has to be content with proxies for variables, interpolation of missing data, and estimation of parameters based on representati ve sample units. One could always find fault with some of the specifications, unlike in physical science research, which is performed under laboratory conditions. As long as the findings conform to logical judgments, one can use the results for economic policy analysis and decision making.