Growth and development of agricultural marketing infrastructure in Haryana

An attempt has been made in this paper (i) to study the growth and development of agricultural marketing infrastructure and (ii) to examine regional variation in marketing infrastructure created in Haryana. The study is based on secondary data collected for the period 1980–81 to 2014–15 on important parameters relating to marketing infrastructure. To study inter-regional variation in infrastructural facilities in the state, district-wise data on important indicators were collected for the year 2014–15 and all the districts were grouped into two regions viz., eastern and western regions. Besides simple tabular analysis, compound growth rates (CGRs) and coefficient of variation (CV) were computed to derive the inferences of the study. The study reveals that the number of regulated markets rose from 88 in the year 1980–81 to 107 in the year 2014–15. With regulation of markets, volume of market arrivals of important crops increased substantially over the years. The increase in market arrivals results in increased income of the market committees, a part of which is invested for further expansion of market infrastructural facilities in the state. The study further reveals that almost all the villages in the state are connected with roads. As regards variability across districts/regions, wide variation was observed in almost all the parameters of marketing infrastructure. Western region witnessed more variation in the case of number of regulated markets, number of villages served per regulated market, road length, road length per lakh of population and percentages of villages connected with roads. In the case of average area served by each regulated market and road length per 100 sq km. of area, the variability was more in eastern region than in western region.