Technical and Allocative Efficiency of Jute Production in Brahmaputra Valley of Assam

Efficiency of Jute Production in Assam

Abstract

The jute industry is occupying an important place in India’s national economy. In India jute is mostly grown in Eastern and North-Eastern parts of the country, viz. West Bengal, Assam, Northern Bihar, South East Orissa, Tripura and Eastern Uttar Pradesh sharing more than 70 per cent of the total jute production of the country. Along with food grain production the eastern India have shown an impressive increase in productivity of fibre crops specially jute and allied fibres. The jute industry occupies an important place in the national economy. Jute fibre and jute fibre products have future potentialities which may create lot of employment opportunities. Except rice, there is enormous potential for increasing the acreage under fruits, vegetables, and tea and fibre crops. In this study an attempt is made to find out the resource use efficiency of jute in different agro-climatic zones of Assam. The specific objective of the study is to measure the resource use efficiency of jute production in Assam. The entire study was carried out on the basis of both primary and secondary data. The secondary data were collected from various Government websites, books, journals and published or unpublished sources. The primary data were collected from households of three major jute growing zones of Brahmaputra Valley. Cobb- Douglass production function was used to estimate the efficiency in jute production. The production function was first estimated through the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method. Technical efficiency was measured by estimating stochastic frontier production function, which assumes time-invariant technical efficiency as the study was done for one year data. The stochastic frontier production function was estimated using FRONTIER version FRONT4.1 computer software, (Coelli 1996). The analysis of farm specific efficiency in jute production brought out that, a fairly high technical efficiency was observed in almost all the three zones. Farmers were allocatively efficient in maximizing their. There was a need for improvement of managerial skill of the farmers by imparting adequate extension support. However, the efficiency level could not be increased only by improved managerial skill of the farmers in absence of adequate technology and infrastructure facility. The study on resource use efficiency suggests that there is a need to organize training for the farmers for increasing the efficiency in allocating and using the available resources in an optimum way, which would enhance production.