*Research Scholar, Department of Economics, Tumkur University, Tumkur
**Associate Professor, Shree Dharmastala Manjunatheshwara College, Ujire, Dakshina Kannada
Online published on 23 July, 2015.
India is a land of villages comprising more than 6, 38,588 villages and still more than 60 percent of rural population depend on agriculture. However, the Indian farming systems have very poor resource based and cannot satisfy the need of the nation with present level of technology. One of the main reasons for the low productivity in the Indian agriculture is the prevalence of small or tiny holdings. Such small units of cultivation reflects serious imbalance in the man-land ratio which is the primary cause of setting in traditionalism in farming, misallocation and improper utilization of human and other resources, low and marginal productivity of labour and land, small savings and subsistence oriented character of farm organization and management. A well planned and judicious combination factors such as, land, labour, farming equipments, livestock, finance, storage facilities, transport, marketing and technical knowledge etc., could lead to economic cultivation. This situation can be created by introducing co-operative farming which would ensure effective measures for expansion of production, improvement of techniques, proper utilization of land and most desirable allocation of the man power. Against this background ‘Pragathi Bandhu’ a unique cooperative farming model, promoted by SKDRDP a Dakshina Kannada based microfinance institution, proving good in empowering small farmers through labour sharing and micro financing in the rural area. However, the model is limited to small geographic area and there is a need to spread this model to other neighboring areas. Keeping the above facts in view, this paper has the following two objectives 1. To give a brief overview of Pragathi Bandhu cooperative farming model; 2. To explain the contribution of Pragathi Bandhu Model to inclusive rural development. The paper is based on the secondary sources of information, which was gathered from publications of SKDRDP (NGO) government departments, journals, books, websites and newspapers.
