Abstract

With inelastic supply of land for cultivation, and high and growing population pressure on cultivable land in a country like India, it is desirable that the cultivable land is as intensively used as possible. This is truer for eastern part of the country where average holding size of farm has fallen below one hectare. Though this part of the country is naturally endowed with fertile soil and abundance surface and sub-surface water usable for cultivable round the year, the raising a second crop is often believed to be constraint by the traditional practice of open grazing of village cattle in fields after the harvest of the main paddy crop. As this believe is not founded on any systematic study, the authors set out to investigate whether open grazing significantly limit cropping intensity of farms.

A field study was carried out covering 225 farms selected through a multi-stage sampling framework from 12 villages covered in three geographically dispersed parts of the Brahmaputra Valley in Northeast India in 2020. Econometric techniques used for analysis of data included instrumental variable method to deal with some endogeneity problem confronted. Results confirm that the open grazing is indeed a limiting factor in intensive mutilation of cultivable land in the study area. As the problem arises from seasonal open access nature of post harvest agricultural field, the problem needs to be addressed under the common property right regime framework.

The policy options aligned with the works of Hardin and Ostrom have been explored. Hardin’s line suggests strict enforcement of the property rights of individual farmers over their holdings in the post-harvest season also. However, such enforcement will require erection of fencing which may be costly not only in terms of physical and financial resources but also in terms of social cost of preventing free grazing. As per Ostrom’s approach the village community should get together to set up norms of cooperation so that the grazing space limited to facilitate double cropping of the rest of the cultivable land. Given the socioeconomic realities in the study are, the second approach appears to be more feasible. Key-words: cropping intensity, irrigation, free grazing, endogeneity.

JEL Classification: O13, Q15, Q12.

Keywords: Free Grazing; Brahmaputra Valley; Cropping Intensity

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Citation

Citation: Jayanta Saud. “Cropping Intensity, its Determinants and Farmer’s Income with Special Reference to the Brahmaputra Valley in Northeast India". Acta Scientific Agriculture 5.6 (2021): 49-58.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Jayanta Saud. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.