Technical Efficiency of Rice Farmers Under Canal Irrigated Systems in Tamil Nadu – An Econometric Analysis

The present study undertaken in Cauvery delta zone has estimated the resource use efficiency in rice production and has assessed the effect of farm specific socio economic factors affecting the technical efficiency. A stochastic frontier production function was estimated to determine technical efficiency of individual farms. The data were collected for two years from the Cost of Cultivation scheme of Tamil Nadu centre. The statistical Model specification test performed to revealed the superiority of the Translog production frontier functional form over Cobb-Douglas model. The results of Translog stochastic production function indicated that fertilizer, seed, labour hours and machine hours significantly influenced yield of paddy. Moreover the marginal value product to input price ratios for seed and fertilizer at 10.14 and 6.22 indicated that it will be highly profitable to increase the use of seed and fertilizer. The study has revealed that the farm-specific technical efficiencies range from 43 per cent to 98 per cent with the mean of 83 per cent which indicates that on average, the realized output can be raised by 17 per cent in the region. The production elasticities indicate that seeds are the fore most important input followed by machine hours, fertilizer, while pesticide cost and labour hours has negative elasticities. The return to scale value was computed at 0.59.