Keri,
Thanks for replying, I had checked the analytics account, and complete drop is due to google SERP results, also position of my site for most pages had dropped by few positions, but all this happened as a sudden and steep change.
Also till now I had not added 'canonical' tag to the paginated pages, and hence I am suspecting it may be that google has penalized me due for duplicacy. But even after fixing these errors still my traffic is dropping.