Labour Productivity of Rice Crop in India’s Indo-Gangetic Plains: A Comparison Between Agriculture in Eastern and Western Regions

Green revolution made India’s development unbalanced by building up a high performing agriculture in the highly irrigated western states of Punjab and Haryana while neglecting the water-rich eastern states of Bihar and Jharkhand. Farming being the most important employment in India, the imbalance generated migration of surplus rural manpower suffering economic distress of the east to seek employment in the western states in which agriculture created demand for labour. An analysis of agricultural production in the contemporary period 2004–05 to 2019–20 indicates that over time the transition and possibly the public attention to eastern agriculture has created an equilibrating pressure on value added and labour productivity so that potential exists for a modern digitized agriculture in the east to absorb manpower especially youth to generate value added in the state while the western states need to prepare for its own transition.