3.1 General profile and areas for concern
The Eastern - Gangetic plain is taken here to consist of those
regions of India and Bangladesh that encompass the 'lower third' of
the river basin of the Ganges and its tributories and at its lower end of the
deltas the rivers Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Meghna in Bangladesh. The area
includes administrative units which cover other ecological areas, but whose
political economies are intricately linked up with the Gangetic plains. The
Ganges, Brahmaputra and most of their tributories originate from the Himalayan
mountains; these are the source of surface and groundwater that could be used
for irrigation development and agricultural growth. At the same time, often
these rivers cause devastating floods; they also waterlog large areas and, in
the absence of adequate drainage system, it results in sluggish rates of growth
in agricultural productivity.
The region suffers from several structural constraints such as
high population densities and skewed distribution of land ownership. Over 50 per
cent of the region's rural people live below the poverty line. Growth in
agricultural production has been far form satisfactory. The compound growth rate
of agricultural production in Eastern U.P. between 1964-65 and 1983-84 was 2.63
per cent per annum (Kolavalli, et.al., 1988) as fig.1 (map) compared to 3.00 per
cent for the whole of U.P. and 2.61 per cent (2) for India as a whole. The
neighbouring states of Bihar, West Bengal and Assam have fared still worse
during the same period. In Bangladesh, during the late seventies and early
eighties, food production growth rate (3 per cent) had outstripped the
population growth rate (approximately 2.6 per cent), but recent analyses suggest
that this trend has not been sustained (Mandal). This is the great paradox of
the eastern region: it has aplenty, the one resource water that has constrained
rapid agricultural expansion and modernisation in many a region in the Indian
sub-continent; and yet, it continues to suffer exceedingly slow pace of
agricultural
modernisation.
