An analysis of profile characteristics of primary agriculture credit societies (PACS) beneficiary farmers in Chhattisgarh

Abstract

The present study was conducted in Raipur, Bilaspur, Durg and Rajnandgaon districts of Chhattisgarh to analyze the profile characteristics of PACS beneficiary farmers of these districts. Total 320 beneficiary farmers were randomly selected for this study and the relevant data were collected personally from all the selected respondents with the help of pre-tested interview schedule. The findings related to socio-personal characteristics of the respondents highlight that most of the respondents were belonged to old age group (51.25%), were male (95.00%), belonged to Other Backward Class (62.81%), were educated up to 5th class, had 6 to 10 members in their family and were non member of Steering Committee of PACS (83.44%). Similarly, findings regarding socio-economic characteristics of the respondents showed that most of them were belonged to the small category of the farmers (36.56%), were adopting the crop husbandry as main occupation (90.94%), had the annual income between ₹ 50,000 to 1,50,000 (38.42%) and among them only 47.00 per cent were able to earn up to ₹ 50,000 annually from their farm enterprises. While the findings concerning to correlation analysis showed that factors such as caste, education, membership in steering committee of PACS, size of land holding, farm material possession and farm income were found to be positive and highly significantly correlated with annual income at 0.01 level of probability.