Successive administrations globally acknowledge the fact that financial inclusion serves as a tool for poverty reduction, especially in rural areas. In Nigeria which has been regarded as the home of poverty, the extent and magnitude of the impact of financial inclusion on the poverty rate are undetermined due to the outbreak of Covid-19 induced economic recession. This paper examines the impact of financial inclusion in the Nigerian context from 1991 to 2021. The study employed the ARDL framework for its analysis. The short-run coefficients imply that bank branches spread, deposits in the rural area, Interest rate, Government expenditure, and GDP growth have a negative and significant impact on poverty reduction while credit to the private sector has a positive and significant impact on poverty reduction. Meanwhile, in the long run, the results also indicate that bank branches spread; GDP growths have a negative and significant impact on poverty reduction while credits to the private sector and government expenditure have a positive and significant impact on poverty reduction. Meanwhile, GDP growth has a negative and significant effect on poverty reduction in Nigeria in the long run. In addition, the results of the T.Y causality tests report that there is evidence of a unidirectional causality running from poverty rate to bank branches spread, and from credit to the private sector to poverty rate. The study, therefore, recommends that the government should provide adequate infrastructural facilities such as roads network, adequate electricity supply, communication networks, and other utilities, especially in rural areas to enable deposit banks to set up more branches. This will enable people to save money, send and receive payments, and also access credit facilities to expand their economic activities which in turn reduce the rate of poverty in the country.

Keywords: Poverty rate, Bank branches spread, Credit to private sector, Deposit in rural area, Interest rate, Government expenditure and GDP growth.

The present study an attempt is made to comparative study on crop diversification as practise by the irrigated and non-irrigated lands of the farmers in Odisha. The study based on primary survey in Keonjhar district of Odisha. For the measurement of agricultural diversification, Herfindahl Index and multiple regression model has been used. The cropping pattern as found out that paddy, being the staple food is cultivated in all regions both in irrigated and non-irrigated lands. It is observed that the share of paddy in gross cropped area is 90.81 per cent for irrigated lands and 96.87 per cent for non-irrigated lands. The regression results considering under study reveal that mostly seed, fertiliser, manures, irrigation charges and area under irrigation positively and significantly contribute towards crop diversification while non-irrigated lands there is crop concentrated comparatively. The coefficient of multiple determinations in respect of all the regions with irrigated lands being comparatively higher than that with nonirrigated lands.

Keywords: Cropping Pattern, Diversification, Irrigated Lands, Minor Irrigation, Non- irrigated Lands.

This paper examines the factors influencing the sustainable growth of agricultural value-addition based on time series data of Bihar over the period 1990-2021. The results indicated that there are significant and certain benefits from the utilization of a system of technological innovations including mechanization, renewed capital stocks, as well as temporary annual cropping, and permanent cropping practices. Farming practices involving crop rotation, multi-cropping, and agroforestry are recommended for sustaining agricultural sustainability since they seem to be economically viable and environmentally friendly. It was found that technological innovations in soil conditions, irrigation systems, and chemical fertilizers might be beneficial to agricultural productivity growth in the long term when they are managed by soil characteristics and in a balanced way. The results also showed that the labor force, the forest area, the number of credits to agriculture, and the amount of energy consumed to power irrigation are likely to be insignificant to boost directly the growth of agricultural value-added. Thus, the various issues raised in the process of using all agricultural technologies must be addressed either by policy or by appropriating the knowledge relating to their management to make them more profitable to agricultural economic growth.

Keywords: Sustainable Economic Growth; Agricultural technology; Cobb-Douglas production function.

JEL Classification: Q01; Q16; C67.

The impact of migration on human development differs across developing countries. This paper analyses the impact of internal migration on children’s education of migrant households in rural India. Child education is one of the critical variables to understand the future development path of any country. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report 2019 acknowledges that internal migration has a severe influence on the educational achievement of children both at the destination and the source areas. This study has investigated the impact of cyclical migration on the dropout (from primary education) rate of left-behind children in source areas of rural India from 64th round of the NSS survey. The study has constructed a binary logistic regression to analyse the impact of migration on children dropout rate in rural India. The result of binary logistic regression suggests that the children of migrant households have a higher probability of dropout than the children of non-migrant households. The average predicted probability of dropout is also high among the children of cyclical migrant households compared to the children of non-migrant households over different socio-economic variables. The girls and boys of migrant households have a higher chance of dropout from primary education than the girls and boys of non-migrant households. Most girls are engaged in domestic duties after dropout, whereas the boys are engaged in agricultural activities. The Migration leads to the feminisation of agriculture, so the school going girl child takes responsibility of domestic duties of their family.

Keywords: Labour Migration, Children Education, Human Capital, Rural India.

JEL Code: R23, I25

Due to the increase in knowledge and environmental concerns of consumers, awareness of green marketing and purchase of green products has become one of the basic issues in consumer research. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of green marketing on the purchase intention of consumers in the retail sector. In this regard, corporate image, which includes corporate social responsibility, product image, and corporate reputation, was considered as a mechanism that facilitates this process. To obtain the required data, we surveyed a group of people with previous experience in purchase of eco-friendly apparel. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed among 423 respondents; 379 were taken for data analysis, eliminating outliers and incomplete questionnaires. The research hypotheses were tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. According to the results, the awareness of green marketing had the impact on corporate social responsibility, product image, and corporate reputation. In addition, these factors have significant positive effect on the purchase intention of consumers. Interestingly, it is worth mentioning that the product image receives the most influence from green marketing and has the most influence on purchase intention. The results of the present study provide guidance to marketing practitioners for the segmentation of target consumers and help them discover better ways of designing their marketing campaigns.

Keywords: Green marketing awareness, Purchase intention, Corporate social responsibility, Product image, Corporate reputation

Haryana is a developing economy and its growth is led by government expenditure in various ways. This expenditure is also an important instrument of the fiscal policy to stabilize the state economy. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of the public expenditures (revenue and capital) on the economic growth of Haryana, with the time span 1991-2017. The long run relationship between economic growth and government expenditure is tested by using ARDL (Auto Regressive Distributed Lag) model, however, the direction of causality has been tested with the help of Granger Causality Test. The empirical results of ARDL model found weak but significant results during studied period. There is uni-directional causality exists from economic growth to capital expenditure i.e., confirmed by the results of Granger Causality test.

Keywords: Economic growth, Government expenditure, ARDL and Granger causality.

The development path as pursued globally, regionally, and nationally reflects a disregard for environmental damage and its consequences. Economic growth has been achieved at the heavy cost of the environment and its sustainability. One of the reports has estimated that the total cost of environmental degradation in India at about Rs. 3.75 trillion (US$80 billion) annually, equivalent to 5.7 % of GDP in 2009 as per the reference year for most of the damage estimates (Mani, 2014:15). This paper aims to analyze the land use changes of the Bannerghatta National Park (from hereafter BNP) and its implications on the development. In the process, the paper explores the issues of environmental conservation in the context of protected areas (PAs). The land use pattern of BNP clearly shows that there is an uneven growth of the urban periphery and an imbalance in development. Most importantly the erosion of dry/moist deciduous forest areas indicates the institutional and policy measure failures in conserving and protecting the BNP. This decreases the contribution of ecosystem services to human and animal wellbeing. The loss of biodiversity and ecological in-equilibrium is one of the major factors contributing to the animal-human conflict. The symbiotic association between the ecology, animal kingdom, and human lives is lost due to the pursuit of development which focuses exploitation of natural resources at the huge cost of the environment.

Keywords: Land Use changes, Bannerghatta National Park, Conservation, Development

India is second largest country in terms of human population and one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It has a dynamic demography and demographic parameters are varied widely among states. The economic growth of India is also not equitable; few states are having moderate level of socio-economic development, while most of the states are lagging behind for decades. State and district level secondary data on selected demographic parameters has been collected and compiled to map the distribution across state/districts. By and large, there is a direct relationship between economic growth and human development among districts. The anticipated ‘dividend’ due to the large youth population is hard to realize as huge number of non-working population is exist in economically active age group. The dependency ratio is one of the prime factor of demographic dividend, is very high among north Indian states, particularly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Though several states are showing a positive demographic progression, such as lower decadal population growth rate, infant mortality and fertility rate, etc. but a large number of non-working populations is dependent on lesser number of economically active people across the states. So the young and rapidly growing population of India could be treated as a potential demographic dividend if the huge idle manpower is employed efficiently.

Keywords: Demographic Dividend, Dependency Ratio, Economic Growth, Poverty Index, HDI

Privatization of education is a global phenomenon. The roots of privatization are located in liberal thinking. According to liberal thinking, privatization provides choices to parents. In the Indian context, there is a continuous increase in private participation in the education sector since the introduction of neoliberal policies in the early nineties. When the country adopted the liberalization, privatization and globalization policies, private participation was encouraged in the education sector also. In this context, the present paper analyses trends in private sector participation in school education and the interstate differences in India. This paper is based on secondary data collected from different sources. The analysis shows a decline in the percentage of primary government schools from 90.60% in 2003-04 to 82.56% in 2019-20 and the percentage of private aided schools also declined, though marginally. But the percentage of private unaided schools increased from 6.50% to 11.49% during the same period. In the case of secondary education, the share of government schools registered a positive growth rate of 1.2. But the share of private aided and unaided schools registered a negative growth rate of- 2.7 and -0.5 respectively. Pearson Correlation Coefficient is calculated to understand the linkages between the state’s economic status and the private sector’s participation in education. Interestingly an association between the economic status of the state indicated by Per Capita Net State Domestic Product (PCNSDP) and the participation of the private sector is observed at the primary and secondary levels. The richer states also have a greater share of private schools.

Keywords: Privatization, school education, Per Capita Net State Domestic Product