Farmers' situation in agriculture markets and role of public interventions in India

Abstract: In our country, majority of agricultural workers (who may include farmers working within a cooperative framework, or those who work individually either as owners or tenants) are shown to be reaping the least amount of profits in the agriculture value chain when compared to the effort they put in. There is a good amount of literature which broadly substantiates this situation in our country. Main objective of this study is to have a broad understanding of the role played by public systems in this value chain, particularly in the segment that interacts with farmers. As a starting point, we first try to get a better understanding of how farmers are placed in a typical agriculture value chain. For this we take the help of recent seminal works on this topic that captured the situation of farmers' within certain types of value chains. Then, we isolate the segment which interacts with farmers and deep-dive into data to understand the role played by public interventions in determining farmers' income from agriculture. NSSO 70th round on Situation Assessment Survey of farmers has data pertaining to the choices of farmers and the type of their interaction with different players in the value chain. Using this data we tried to get a econometric picture of the role played by government interventions and the extent to which they determine the incomes that a typical farming household derives out of agriculture.