Facilitating and Hindering Factors Affecting Growth and Functioning of Farmers Producer Companies in India

Farmers Producer Companies (FPCs) are fundamentally farmer-owned and farmer-governed micro-enterprises. In current scenario FPCs have emerged as a new agri-business model. In India, FPCs have grown substantially and some have shown incredible success but that only 20 to 30 per cent of these FPOs are operating well and the rest are either nonfunctional or inferior, failing even to achieve basic operational sustainability. A need was felt to study the major factors responsible for growth and hindering factors constraining growth of successful FPCs in India. The study was conducted in eight different FPCs across the India. The data were collected from 293 randomly selected members of the selected eight FPCs. In-depth interviews were conducted with key informants to ensure the triangulation of data. Five dimensions viz. technical factors, organizational, economic, infrastructural and marketing factors were covered to assess facilitation and hindrance in FPC growth. It was found most important factor for facilitating growth of FPC was ‘dynamic leadership’, followed by ‘hard work of members’, and ‘skill training of members'whereas ‘lack of enough seed capital for initial phase'was one of the most challenging hindering factors followed by ‘lack of loan from banks'and ‘lack of knowledge about IPR issue’. These factors need to be identified and addressed to make high performance of FPCs possible.