Abstract

The question of sustainable income and employment in the rural areas seems to be very much dependent on the degree of diversification of land use towards cultivating various crops. In view of this, crop diversification has been an important issue of agricultural development not only in India, but also in other parts of the world. In India, the growth of area under cultivation in different states remained stagnant in the current decades and the growth of yield of various crops has reached the saturation level. Efforts are now being made in different regions of India to cultivate those crops, which are remunerative and environment friendly. To examine this, an attempt has been made in this paper to study intensively, the nature and extent of crop diversification in West Bengal, a rice-growing state of India, for the period of 1970 to 2005. A number of explanatory factors have been considered to explain this phenomenon. Our findings, primarily based on official data, suggest that marginal and small farmers play a positive role in crop diversification and that has been supported by the growth of various infrastructure networks during the period under consideration.

Key words: Crop diversification, farm size, agro-infrastructure, robust regression, median least squares, West Bengal.