Socio-economic and Communicational Profile of Member and Non-member Farmers of FPOs in Uttar Pradesh Verma Ashwani Kumar1, Singh V.K.2, Dubey S.K.3*, Upadhyay Sachchidanand2, Singh O.P.4, Akash2 1Assistant Professor, Rama University, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh 2C.S.A. University of Agriculture and Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh 3Principal Scientist ICAR-ATARI, Zone III, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh 4Principal Scientist, Division of Agricultural Extension, IARI, New Delhi *Corresponding author email id: skumar710@gmail.com
Abstract The FPOs in current scenario are playing paramount roles in strengthening markets for commodities produced, bought and sold by smallholders thereby reducing transaction costs; managing risk; building social capital; enabling collective action; and redressing missing markets. The study was conducted in purposively selected Central Zone of Uttar Pradesh as this Zone gives the universal representativeness in the state of Uttar Pradesh with reference to the FPOs. There are 14 districts in Central Zone and the researcher has purposively selected only two districts namely Kanpur Dehat and Kannauj on the basis of maximum number of FPOs working in these districts. Every three out of four FPOs were selected from each sampled district by simple random sampling technique. Thus, total 3 FPOs from Kannauj District and 4 FPOs from Kanpur Dehat District were selected. Further, 20 member farmers and 40 non-member farmers from the operational area of each FPOs were sampled to compare their selected profile. In this way, total 420 respondents were selected from 7 FPOs for the study. The variables included for comparison were from broad areas of socio personal viz, age, education, caste and family size; socio-economic namely, land holding, annual income & occupation; and communicational variables like, social participation, mass media contact & extension agency contact and the affected data were subjected for tabular analysis and Z test and Mann-Whitney U test to see the significance of difference if any. The socio-economic profile was compared between member farmers and non-members, the results showed that there is highly significant difference between two groups in age and social participation, mass media contact, extension agency contact and annual income traits (P<0.01). Top Keywords Communication profile, FPOs, Mann-Whitney test, Socio-personal traits, Socio-economic traits. Top |