Resource Use Efficiency of Tribal Farming in Sittilingi Valley of Tamil Nadu

Abstract

The economy of tribal population primarily depends on agriculture. Heavy deterioration of natural resources in the forest area and reduction in the flora and fauna made their shifting cultivation unfeasible. Since access to agricultural technology and inputs from the state or private sector machinery is much weaker their net returns from agriculture are also much lower. A study undertaken in the Sittilingi Valley of Dharmapuri district among 50 tribal and 50 non-tribal farmers selected randomly to compare tribal farming with non-tribal farming is more essential to document the economic condition of tribal farming. The resource use efficiency among tribal and non tribal farms revealed that the production functions fitted were found to be on the increasing returns to scale underlying the scope to increase the inputs for increasing the productivity. Since access to institutional credit facilities was found to be much weaker, a Farmers Interest Group (FIG) is suggested to be established among them, which may help the tribal farmers to invest more on farm inputs so that the productivity of crops can be increased considerably

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.100375

Pages

175 - 179

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords