Building rural resilience

Shift in rural incomes, with reduced dependence on pure cultivation, is an encouraging trend that helps pull out excess and disguised labour from the sector

- DIPTI DESHPANDE SHARVARI RAJADHYAKSHA Respectively principal economist & economic analyst, CRISIL

of income, up from 35% in 2017. The nudge would have been better visibility and lesser fluctuation in incomes. We focus on the shifts within the agriculture and allied sector and see how this shift is reflected in the output data.

The allied sector (within the agriculture and allied category), which includes livestock, fishing and forestry, is playing a much larger role than traditional crop production. The share of allied sector gross value added (GVA) in the agriculture and allied category had been broadly stable at ~35% until FY14 but rose to almost 46% by FY24. At the same time, the share of traditional crop GVA fell to 54%.

Much of this gap is because of an increase in the share of livestock in the agriculture and allied sector GVA from about 23% to 30%. The share of fishing, though relatively small, rose from 5% to over 7%. The average growth of over 6% in allied sector GVA during this period is strikingly higher than the sub-2% growth in crop GVA.