Technical efficiency of maize production by employing stochastic frontier approach

Abstract

In India, agricultural sector undergo a large number of reforms and huge policy initiatives to improve the productivity in agricultural sector it continue to underperform due to large number of problems faced by this sector. One such crop is maize since it is important cereal crop with 15 million Indian farmers are engaged in cultivation. The maize requirement would be about 45 million tons as against current production of 24 million tons. The findings presents the mean technical efficiency more or less same for both local and improved seed variety farmers however at disaggregated level the improved seed variety farmers 23% of the farmers falls in the range of 0.71 to 1.0 of TE whilst 4.76% of the farmers for the local variety seed farmers. Therefore, we highly recommend the elimination of barriers to access to information particularly in rural areas with respect to improved technologies and information related to market ensures in augmenting the maize production.