Livestock and Poultry Holdings in India: An Intertemporal Comparision

The present work examines the trends in livestock and poultry in India. In particular the focus of the research is on the inter-linkage between size of landholdings and livestock holdings of the households across states in India. The decade between 1991-92 and 2002-03 which was characterised by a marked fall in agricultural growth, steeply rising landlessness and inequality in landholdings, and a general crisis in the agricultural sector was also marked by steep decline in livestock holdings and a decline in growth of poultry holdings. Ownership of livestock and poultry is extremely unequal across households in different size-classes of operational holdings. There is also evidence of differences in compositional shifts across different operational holdings and across states.