Why doesn't agriculture contribute a major …

Because most of the person employed in agriculture are underemployed that is disguised unemployed.They are doing less work than their potential.Hence,thier productivity is zero

When 50% of the Indian workforce is doing agriculture, why is the contribution of agriculture to the GDP only 16%? Learn how to jump start your online business for free! As a middle class person what all items do you spend on? You might be spending on housing, food, entertainment, education, clothes, transportation, art, electricity, water, communication… In short, food is just one among the dozen big things you need and spend on. The spending on raw food grains and vegetables/fruits, is only a small part of the monthly budget. Unless you want to be eating and sleeping all day, you have plenty to do with your life. Extrapolate it to the nation. GDP accounts for sum total of all our activities from banking to transportation, from airlines to police, from factories to roads. Food production/consumption is only a small part of it. That is true for any major economy and something quite natural. In the US, the farms alone contribute only a little more than 1% of GDP, for instance. Whether we put 50% of our labour or 10% of our labour on food production, we would not be able to change how much our households spend on food or that we need plenty of things besides food. However, when 50% of people share only 16% of income, there is poverty in farming by default. We are condemning them to low incomes. is why we have to get a majority of our government makes money: 35% is corporation taxes [from their profits], 18% is excise duties [that these corporations buy], 18% is income tax [mostly from employees in these corporations], 17% is customs tax [from what the corporations import] and about 12% is service tax [from what they sell].