Agriculture Marketing In India

1.1 Introduction

India is basically an agricultural country and one third population depends on the agriculture sector directly or indirectly. Agriculture forms the backbone of the Indian economy.. The agriculture sector in India accounted for 13.9 per cent GDP in 2013 -2014 compared to 24.7 per cent GDP in2000-2001. Though the share of Indian agriculture in the GDP has been steadily declining, it is still the single largest contributor to the GDP and plays a vital role in the overall socio-economic development of India.

Agriculture marketing is mainly the buying and selling of agriculture products. In earlier days when the village economy was more or less self sufficient the marketing of agriculture products presented no difficulty as the

Paddy is one of the most important food crops of India and is second in importance throughout the world. It feeds more than 50 per cent of the world’s population. . India has the largest area under cultivation (42.56 million hectares during 2013-14) followed by China and Bangladesh. India is second to China in terms of volume of paddy output and accounting more than 20 per cent of global production. It is growing in almost all the states of India, but is mostly concentrated in the river valleys, deltas and low-lying coastal areas of northeastern and southern India. One-third of the world’s paddy cultivation area is in India. The average paddy yield of India is 1339 kgs per hectare.

The paddy producing states are Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odessa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir which together contribute over 95 per cent of the country’s crop. Of these, West Bengal, Odessa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Bihar are the major cultivators. About 85 per cent of the country 's total paddy output is grown during the kharif season (between June and September) while the rest of the 15 per cent is cultivated during the Rabi season (between November and

 Agricultural marketing is a process which starts with the farmers… to produce a saleable commodity and it involves and aspects of the marketing structure or system, both financial and institutional, with technical and economic considerations, including product assembly processing, distribution and use by the final consumer (OECD, 1966)

 Agricultural marketing in the study of all the activities again and policies involved in the procurement of farm inputs by the farmers and the movement of agricultural precuts from the farmers to consumer” (Acharya and Agarwal, 1987).

1.2.2 Basic