Divya Budhia Gupta
Assistant Professor in Economics
PCM S.D. College for Women
Jalandhar
Abstract
It is now a known fact that Punjab, once one of the richest states of the country, has fallen from that position and is not anyway near to regain the same. Its economy, especially primary sector, has been caught in a web of crisis, viz. unemployment, low investment and growth, archaic technologies, which are not easy to untangle. States’ major chunk of population is still employed in agriculture, which is decelerating. Secondary sector is also not growing at desired pace. Service sector alone fails to establish the inter-sectoral linkages, which are much required to generate employment and investment opportunities and bring the economy back on to the high growth path. The paper attempts to chalk out the growth pattern of the economy in the pre and post reform period starting from 1981-82. Study is based on secondary data, collected from various government websites. Analysis was done using Software Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), V.21. The results showed that the country’s growth rate was significantly higher than states’ growth rate in post reform period. The results also revealed that in the post reform period, growth rate of the primary sector was significantly lower than that of secondary and tertiary sectors. There was significant difference in the pre and post liberalisation growth rates of primary and tertiary sectors. While primary sector’s growth rate was higher in pre reform period, it was the other way round for the tertiary sector.
Key Words: Punjab, Unemployment, Primary Sector, Decelerating.
