Challenges of ’situational assessment of agricultural households survey’ in adjudicating the cooperative agencies’ status quo in India

The study scrutinizes, whether situational assessment surveys (SAS) are suitable to judge the state of cooperatives in India and further is it advantageous to sell livestock products through cooperatives in India, and which variables influence their decision to use a particular marketing channel. We evaluated data on the disposal of livestock products to various channels using milk and egg disposal information from the 77th round of the NSSO’s situation assessment survey, which comprises a sample of 58040 households. Results show that farmers are only selling a small fraction (less than one-fifth) of their overall disposal to the organized sector. The sale of eggs and milk is dominated by the unorganized sector. According to our findings, selling milk (from cows and buffalo) through cooperatives results in lower prices for households. However, the evidence reveals an inverted tendency. The study proposes that the situation assessment survey is not giving a holistic picture to analyse the compensation of organized marketing channels due to numerous complex assumptions that had been made, in determining the cost of production for in-milk cattle. Due to this the impression of non-profitability via cooperatives as compared to unorganized is fuelled. Nevertheless, cooperatives bring producers many unrecognized perks. Our study explored whether SAS is effective in this context and also offers some recommendations about how to deal with the concerns in this direction and suggested a more comprehensive survey.