Economic Sustainability through Farmers Interest Groups and their Linkage with Institutional Agencies — An Evidence from Karnataka

For improving production and marketing of agricultural produce, group approach can act as a panacea. In this endeavour, the present study carried out in the Raichur district, has reported the impact of formation of commodity-specific Farmers Interest Groups (FIGs) for pigeonpea and sweet orange crops. After formation of FIGs, several production and marketing interventions were carried like capacity building, awareness generation, knowledge enhancement, institutional linkage development, etc. The impact of FIG for pigeonpea has revealed the total additional benefit to farmers due to savings in cost and additional net returns from output share amounted, on an average over 2 years of 2010–11 and 2011–12, to 23,991 per farmer or 5,756 per acre. The impact of FIG for sweet orange has shown additional benefit of 7899 per ton (78.50%) over the private dealers of Bangalore market and 8456 per tonne (89.50%) over pre-harvest contractors by selling through Safal institutional market. Therefore, promotion of FIGs and their linking to institutional agencies for input supply, output marketing and technology transfer would result in improvement in livelihood of farmers, leading to economic sustainability. Therefore, the study has suggested to bring out a comprehensive policy with institutional framework and adequate incentives for promotion of FIGs for agricultural and horticultural crops in the country.