Sugar consumption was around 6 kg and shot up to 13. Textile consumption which remained at around 15 metres in cotton equivalents crossed the planners' target of 20 metres and was 25 metres in 1990. Vegetable and fruit demand which was earlier around 3 percent now grows above 5 percent annually.

I had built up the vegetable growth number from some shaky NSS numbers but now the Prime Minister's speech has sanctified it. My Shastri Memorial Lecture earlier and Vijay Vyas has shown the persistence of this in the last few years. This feature emerges from higher and more stablegrowth. Since '75 we have had only three years of low growth, while in earlier decades, growth was lower and highly unstable. Bad years are now on account of bad policies. Agricultural demand is now rising fast and diversifying. According to some, growth picked up in 1981 and then in 1991. Careful statistical work showed once investment levels reached around 20 percent and sustained public investment crowded in private investment growth picked up. The divide was in 1974/75.

Second, the growth of regulated markets has been very poor in India and a lot of vegetables, fruits, tobacco, oilseeds and other dry and rainfed crops are sold outside regulated markets. The Shanker-lal Guru Committee and the Market Intell Wing of the Agriculture Ministry show the poor state of regulated markets in dry and rainfed areas. Markets are basically developed in irrigated areas and for grain crops. Since crop diversification is basically taking place in some dry and rainfed areas, there is a great mismatch between marketdevelopment and where the action is.

In states like Gujarat, Karnataka, Bengal a lot of market trade is taking place, but there are high price spreads, no quality control and lack of information. On the road from Dum Dum to Kalyani, earlier one would find hardly any traffic and now it is full of trucks with potatoes, mustard and pulses, but I am told there are very few regulated markets. We had started in Gujarat a scheme of giving information to the farmer using information technology, but this is exceptional.

The Delhi government said recently that trade was not ``responsible'' for vegetable prices. Since a lot of wholesale transactions take place outside regulated markets, trade is literally responsible. The Guru Committee shows that market development will be self-financing. It is a good thing for the Delhi Administration to pu-blish the auction price of vegetables in the Azadpur mandi, but no one seems to realise that for the same commodity a 600 percent price spread on the same day suggests marketfailure and a violation of the ``fair price'' requirement of the marketing laws.

Third, we have to gear up technologies for a diversified agriculture. This is more complex than the HYV's for grain crops. ICAR has taken up the mission, but it will take time. A public and private system which meet the needs of diversifying agriculture is needed. The old KVK's are given up, but apart from a few private companies, no one is covering the last mile with the farmer.

Fourth, the less talked of the storage and transport infrastructure the better. The significant exceptions are some cooperatives and private companies, say in the poultry sector. The Rural Infrastructure Fund which we had all pushed, is stuck in a rut, because the `bankers' would rather give loans to state government-guaranteed projects rather than build up real rural infrastructure.

The stop go in trade and agricultural policies is amazing. Trade will export in some parts of the year and import at other times and there is nothing wrong with that.One of our senior leaders just informed us that she would sell onions at two rupees a kilo. Also the process of phased market reform is stopped by every conceivable crank and of course they are all ``agricultural experts''. Neither the Central government nor the states have any capability to deliver vegetables to the housewife, but we are routinely told that ESMA will be applied.

The splurge in government consumption means a macro-economy where prices are rising while there is excess capacity in the non-white goods part of capital goods and basic industries. One does not see the end of the tunnel. The country is owed the outlines of a coherent and detailed strategy. The kisan does not benefit with inflation. I don't want expenditure on infrastructure and defence to be cut down, but there are no free lunches. Inflation will not revive infrastructure or lead to sound defence. Finally, don't listen to the dream merchants.