Department of Agricultural Economics, Choudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar-125004
The study was conducted in the state of Haryana in 2014–15 to study the various market news and information services made available by market committees of the state and to know their effective utilization by farmers. Six regulated markets namely Sirsa, Ratia. Kaithal, Karnal, Rohtak and Hodal were selected for the purpose, two from each of the 3 zonal administrations of the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board. The responses of 120 farmers were secured from each selected market through pretested questionnaire to test the effective utilization of these services. It came to light that none of the markets except Sirsa had adequate infrastructure in place to disseminate market news to the farmers. The awareness percentages for Notice Board, Ticker Board, Agri Business Information Centre, Library and AGMARKNET were 45.8, 16.6, 4.1, 0 and 0.8 respectively. The percentage of farmers who found these facilities useful was even lower. Out of all the Information sources, farmers also ranked commission agents, fellow farmers, newspapers, village traders as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively for their reliability for getting market related information. The results clearly showed the neglected state of such an important aspect of agricultural produce marketing. The study recommended that the market committees should increase the number of notice boards and primarily work towards making the farmers aware of the various sources of information already available to them such as ABIC, Library, AGMARKNET. Also, farmers opined to get prices, arrivals and various schemes related information through SMS.
Haryana, market information, regulated market, utilization
