"Agriculture is not an activity of the past, and is decisive to India's growth as it leverages growth in other sectors as well. However, there is proof that India is paying little attention to its purchasing power core represented by villages", the report titled `India's Agriculture Sector: The Real Y2K Problem' says.

The BIU is a policy research and consultancy organisation. The report, part of its ongoing research activities, is aimed at drawing attention of the Government, which as other governments in the past, has failed to address several issues plaguing the agriculture sector.

According to the report, the Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who set the tone for reforms process aimed at speeding up economic growth, included in the list of priorities infrastructure development, financial sector reforms, improved expenditure management, the insurance sector, the restructuring of public sector enterprises and disinvestment of equity held by the Government in the PSEs. The priorities, however, do not include agriculture.

"Has India moved away from being an agrarian economy to become a redoubtable manufacturing economy? Has India moved away from being a manufacturing economy to become a serious service-driven economy? Does not agriculture matter any longer? The report raises these and other related questions, primarily because India's agriculture sector and the purchasing power core (villages) still continues to link country's overall purchasing power and, therefore, is important factor in its competitiveness in the global market.

"If India's policymakers and the managers of its economy do not pay attention to its purchasing power core, there would be little advantage or benefit that would emerge from the focus on banking, insurance, disinvestment, manufacturing and information technology".

"The real Y2K problem remains in the shadows and is eclipsed by initiatives that belong to esoteric domains", the study titled . "Agriculture is as demanding as information technology and therefore, requires the urgency and purpose applied in resolving the technological Y2K problems".

According to the study, India cannot ignore the economic relationships between purchasing power and agriculture as agriculture is decisive to the country's competitiveness. It explains the purchasing power of the entire economy. But the Government's priorities do not include agriculture.

"The contours of global trade in agriculture produce and commodities would be rewritten over a period beginning with the ministerial discussions at Seattle in November 1999. The debate and the discerning policies pertinent to infrastructure and information technology would be irrelevant if India has no plan to shape its own purchasing power before it shaped the contours of global trade.

"Shorn of adequate domestic purchasing power, it is difficult to imagine what the contours of global trade in produce and commodities would do to the demand for infrastructure and information technology. Without adequate purchasing power, the importance of the agreements pertinent to trade in other merchandise and services would be purely academic".

There are too many bugs in India's agriculture economy like supply-side sops and subsidies which mitigate the impact of the bugs but provide temporary reprieves at best. The Government ought to look at the sources of inconsistencies, repression a and undernourishment in the agriculture sector. Such a task should be initiated before the year 2000 begins to tick.