Impact of economic reforms on rural development in Andhra Pradesh: An overview

The year 1991 is an important landmark in the post-independent economic history of India. The country faced a severe economic crisis which triggered in part by a serious balance of payments situation. The crisis was convert into an opportunity to affect some fundamental changes in the content and approach to economic policy. Moreover, since 1991 onwards Indian economy has been exposed to economic liberalization and globalisation in line with Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) and stabilization policies initiated by Bretton wood institutions such as International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It is clear that there has been a shift in Indian economic policy from state-oriented development strategy to market oriented development leaving the decisions of productions and distribution to the market signals. Moreover, the new reform measures seek to redefine the role India state and market so as to improve the productivity and efficiency of the system and there by accelerate growth and to enable India state to focus more intensively on certain socio-economic goals. Because of these, the present economic status of India is very good and very strong. However, What have the reforms achieved in respect of these goals after implementation of more than one decade. Mr. Montek S Ahluwalia has assessed economic performance of the states in Post reforms period in India. He has found that the difference in performance across states was enormous. Some states have done exceptionally well, several others show a strong performance, while some were doing very poorly. In this context, where is Andhra Pradesh (AP) stand on this matter. In fact, AP has earned for itself the reputation of being at the forefront of economic reforms implementation in the country on its own in mid 1990s. The question arises here is why AP government also taken initiative to start economic reforms and how these had impacted on the rural sector. This paper is divided into seven parts for analysis in order to investigate this. For this, this paper has used the date upto around 2006 only.