‘Land-holding farmers doing non-farming activities improve labour efficiency’ Premium

Study finds land-holding farmers engaging in non-farming activities improve labour efficiency, impacting farm operations positively.

Land-holding farmers who engage in non-farming activity tend to improve labour efficiency on their farms, a recent study has found.

The study aimed to understand the impact of multiple job holding on farm labour use efficiency. The researchers used data from the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) of farmers from States such as Odisha, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh for the period between 2010 and 2014.

“This is important as participation in non-farm activities alters farmers’ labour allocation decisions between farm and non-farm activities,” the researchers said in their paper.

The data came from the Village Dynamics in South Asia Project. The researchers adopted data envelopment analysis to estimate labour use efficiency. This is a mathematical technique that compares the efficiency of multiple workers doing the same kind of task without having to get into exactly how they do it.

Anviksha Drall, assistant professor of economics at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and Sabuj Kumar Mandal, associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT-Madras, conducted the study.

Their article ‘Does multiple job holding raise labour use efficiency of the farm operators? Evidence from rural India?’, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Economics.

The researchers found that when farmers migrated, either within their State or outside, they gained new knowledge about farm practices that they applied to their farms when they returned. Often, farmers had time on their hands after sowing seeds. In the intervening months, their family carried on the agricultural work. Large farmers with financial wherewithal hired labour to work in their absence, Mr. Mandal said.