POLICY ANALYSIS - WHAT AND HOW: A CASE OF AGRICULTURAL PRICE AND MARKETING POLICIES IN INDIA

摘要

I feel greatly privileged and honoured to deliver this year's Parthasarthy Memorial Lecture, in the 30* Annual Conference on Agricultural Marketing, being jointly organized by the Indian Society of Agricultural Marketing and Institute of AgriculturalSciences of Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. It is gratifying to me as I had the opportunity to personally know Dr Parthasarthy since 1986 when he came to Sukhadia University, Udaipur, as Conference President of the 46th Annual Conference of Indian Society of Agricultural Economics and I was the Organizing Secretary of the Conference. Shortly after this conference, Indian Society of Agricultural Marketing came into being and Dr Parthasarthy was elected as the first and founder President of ISAM. My association with him got further strengthened when I formally took over as Founder Chief Editor of Indian Journal of Agricultural Marketing, which is now in the 30th year of publication. Apart from his scholarly contributions in rural and agrarian economy, including poverty and hunger, both at national and international levels, his role, as President of ISAM, in furthering the research and dialogues in agricultural marketing has been immense. I may mention here that till 1998, 'agricultural marketing' had been a part of Ministry of Rural development at the centre. Some of you may recall that during our 12th Annual Conference of ISAM in 1998,organized by me at Jaipur, we invited the then Union Minister for Rural Development as Chief Guest and in his address at the Conference, he announced constitution of an Expert Committee on Agricultural Marketing, under my chairmanship. On the basis of myinterim report after a month or so, entire agricultural marketing section of Government of India, including DMI and NIAM, were transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture. Coming back to Dr Parthasarthy's role, I wish to put on record that it was his vision that, unlike many other professional societies, in ISAM, we nave quite significant representation of marketing institutions and practitioners, apart from researchers, scholars and teachers. I am grateful to Prof. Radhakrishna, President and the members of the ISAM for providing me this opportunity to pay my tributes to the great scholar and visionary by delivering this lecture in his memory.