Exploring the Influence of Homophily and Contiguity on Agricultural Policy Diffusion in India

Research on the transmission of agricultural policies is essential to understand and analyse how to facilitate this process. It is especially important for countries like India, where approximately a fifth of the economy is dependent on the agricultural sector. We inspect the role of agricultural homophily and geographic proximity on the diffusion of the National Food Security Mission (NFSM) in the year 2020-2021 in India. Using descriptive statistics of network graphs we created, we find that factors of homophily like similar agricultural conditions and cultivable area of states aid the diffusion of NFSM policies across Indian states. This paper also paves the way for future research possibilities since we fail to find any regression models with statistically significant results.

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