Agriculture and Rural Marketing

Indian agriculture in spite of its declining share in the total Gross Domestic Product, has remained the backbone of the country's economy and supports nearly 65 per cent of the population. The contours of Indian agriculture started showing improvement gradually after the mid-1960s with the introduction of High Yielding varieties and the growing emphasis on the development of agro-infrastructure like irrigation input supply, storage, marketing and distribution of food grains. India is at the threshold of another revolution in the field of agriculture, dairy, food horticulture and poultry. Now the challenge before Indian agriculture is to feed the second most populous nation in the world accounting for about 17 per cent of world's population. On account of globalization and liberalization the rural areas the consuming a large quantity of industrial and urban manufactured Products. In recent years rural markets have acquired significance in countries like India as the overall growth of economy has resulted into substantial increase in the purchasing power of the rural community. Rural marketing in India has still a long way to go. Rural marketers have to understand the fact that rural marketing in India has a tremendous potential in our country. Rural marketers should understand this fact and try to tap the huge untapped potential in rural India. This book agriculture and Rural Marketing contains 27 chapters contributed by scholars who belong to different Universities/Colleges and Institutions. The contributors have presented their views analytically connected with different aspects of agriculture and rural marketing. Surely this book will be very much useful for policy-makers, researchers, academicians, practitioners and all those who directly or indirectly have connection with agriculture and rural marketing. (jacket)