Agricultural Growth And Poverty Alleviation In Uttar Pradesh: A District Level Analysis

Abstract

Lucknow district presents an instructive case in the agriculture–poverty debate: it is the administrative capital of 
India's most populous state, the least poor of its 75 districts, yet it retains a substantial agrarian hinterland where 
more than a tenth of the population remains deprived. This paper asks whether agricultural growth has driven 
poverty alleviation in Lucknow over twenty-three years, and whether the relationship is a durable equilibrium or 
a transient co-movement. Using an annual series for 2000–01 to 2022–23 anchored on NITI Aayog 
Multidimensional Poverty Index benchmarks, NSS consumption poverty estimates and Directorate of Economics 
and Statistics district data, the study applies augmented Dickey–Fuller unit root tests, Engle–Granger 
cointegration, an error-correction model, Granger causality and distributed-lag estimation. Poverty fell from 
22.52 per cent to 8.12 per cent while foodgrain yield rose from 1,975 to 2,798 kg per hectare. All series are 
integrated of order one and are cointegrated (ADF = -2.295, p = 0.0209), establishing a stable long-run 
relationship. The long-run elasticity of poverty with respect to farm yield is -1.826, substantially exceeding the 
short-run elasticity of -1.758, and the error-correction term of -0.441 implies that 44.1 per cent of any 
disequilibrium is corrected annually, a half-life of 1.19 years. Real agricultural wages and non-farm 
diversification carry independent and significant effects. The evidence indicates that agricultural growth 
alleviates poverty in Lucknow principally through a slow equilibrium adjustment operating via wages rather than 
through immediate output gains, and that monsoon dependence continues to generate short-run poverty volatility 
despite high irrigation coverage.