Q.Explain why the primary sector's share of India's national output has declined over the decades while it still employs a large share of the workforce.

This mismatch arises because agriculture's productivity per worker is much lower than that of industry or services, so a large workforce still produces a comparatively smaller output share. …

This mismatch between India's occupational structure (where people work) and its output structure (where income is generated) is one of the defining structural features of the Indian economy, and it arises mainly from differences in labour productivity across sectors.

As the Indian economy has grown, industry and especially services have expanded rapidly, adopting more capital, technology and organisation per worker, which raises output per worker in those sectors. Agriculture, by contrast, is still practised in large parts of the country on small and fragmented landholdings, with limited mechanisation and irrigation in many regions, so output per agricultural worker has risen much more slowly. Because industry and services generate a great deal of output while employing a comparatively smaller number of workers, their share of national output has grown faster than their share of employment. Agriculture shows the mirror-image pattern: its share of national output has declined as the rest of the economy has grown and modernised faster, even though it continues to employ a very large share of the workforce, partly because non-agricultural employment opportunities have not expanded fast enough to absorb workers moving — or wanting to move — out of agriculture, and partly because of disguised unemployment already present within agriculture itself. …

Students often attribute this purely to "agriculture becoming less important," missing the deeper productivity-per-worker explanation; examiners look for the productivity …