Agricultural Incentives in India

This book gathers twelve papers which sustained the discussions and conclusions of an Indo-French seminar organized by the Centre do Sciences Humaines (CSH, New Delhi) on 3 and 4 April 2000 at the India International Centre (IIC, New Delhi). The objective of this meeting was rather ambitious and sensitive: to debate the relevance and sustainability of a nearly forty-years old system of public incentives to Indian agriculture, mainly subsidies to water, electricity and fertilizers. The sensitivity of the subject, as also its pertinence, is rooted in the difficult challenge that India had to take up since the early 1990s: to liberalize and open to the world its domestic market in order to bypass some inefficiencies or failures of its mixed economy, without selling of in the process its decision-making independence, as well as some social and environmental objectives peculiar to the sub-continent or to the world community.