India has been home to striking agricultural success in the past, but its agriculture sector is facing new challenges. The country’s farmers must feed an enormous and growing population with few possibilities for increasing the amount of land under cultivation and under conditions of water scarcity. At a workshop entitled "Re-energizing Agriculture in India," experts from government, farmers’ organizations, the private sector, and the research community gathered to discuss the future agenda for agriculture in India. The workshop, held on December 17, 2004, in New Delhi, was jointly sponsored by the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, the World Bank, and IFPRI.

Discussions centered on four overarching topics: reviewing the reforms so far and setting the reform agenda for Indian agriculture, rationalizing government expenditures with respect to agricultural investments and subsidies, meeting agricultural technology needs, and identifying the next steps in re-energizing agriculture in India.

Inaugurating the workshop, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, remarked that the growth rate in Indian agriculture must be raised to about 4 percent, if overall GDP is to grow at 7-8 percent per year. This is a significant challenge as agricultural growth appears to be decelerating and would require a major boost in public investments in areas ranging from irrigation to rural roads, and would necessitate improvement in the incentives for the private sector to invest in the sector in a major way. He appreciated the work that IFPRI had done in this regard and suggested that the workshop should come up with an operational agenda for policy reforms to take Indian agriculture to new heights.

Isher Judge Ahluwalia chaired the valedictory session given by M. V. Rajashekharan, minister of state for planning, who urged that WTO-related trade issues should be made a high policy priority and taught in schools to raise awareness of this important topic in a globalizing society.

Shenggen Fan and Ashok Gulati from IFPRI presented a paper on investment and subsidy issues. They suggested that institutional reforms are critical to containing subsidies and raising investments in such a way that high returns accrue to every million rupees spent on agriculture.