Comparative Progress of Odisha in Millet Farming: An Inter-State Analysis through Agricultural Efficiency Index

Abstract

Odisha is an ‘agro-ethnic’ state located in the eastern region of India. A total of 76 per cent of the state working population is engaged in agriculture and allied sectors along with 22.84 per cent of the total state population is tribal in nature. The colonial period of the pre-Independence era and the green revolution period of the post-Independence era have imposed the mono and duo cropping culture in all states of the country including Odisha and caused the marginalization of millet farming. The basket of millets constitutes the crops like ‘Jowar, ‘Bajra’, ‘Ragi’, and ‘Small Millets’. These are economic, nutrition-rich, disease-resistant, drought-tolerant, and climate-resilient crops in nature. Therefore, to improve both individual and farm health the government of Odisha has initiated the focus on millets production by launching the ‘Odisha Millets Mission’ (OMM) in 2017-18. As with Odisha, some other states are also functioning with their millets program such as – the Andhra Pradesh Millets Programme (2016) and Telangana Millets Mission (2018). This paved the way for the declaration of the ‘National Year of Millets’ in 2018 by the Indian Government and the ‘International Year of Millets’ in 2023 by the United Nations Organisation. This paper intends to analyse the comparative progress of Odisha in millets farming with the other major states in light of its vibrant millets mission program. For this, we have applied the method ‘Measures of Agricultural Efficiency’ suggested by S.S. Bhatia (1967). The secondary data on the area, production, and yield of four main millets crops, viz., Jowar, Bajra, Ragi, and Small Millets extracted from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India enable us to construct the ‘Agricultural Efficiency Index’ of millets farming for the selected 20 major states of India at two-time points, i.e., 2016-17 and 2020-21. The results from the analysis show that the agricultural efficiency index of Odisha has decreased from 59.73 to 55.58 but in a relative sense the rank of Odisha has improved from the 17th position to the 16th position between the two-time points of 2016-17 to 2020-21. It also states that Himachal Pradesh has increased from the ‘low efficiency’ category to the ‘high efficiency’ category, Kerala has decreased from the ‘high efficiency’ category to the ‘low efficiency’ category and the remaining 18 states including Odisha have no change in their efficiency category between 2016-17 and 2020-21. The result of Spearman’s rank correlation test (.965) also states that the selected states have shown relatively low progress in terms of millet farming as their respective ranks are highly correlated between both periods. © 2023 Indian Society of Agricultural Economics. All rights reserved.