Dynamics of institutional agricultural credit and growth in Punjab: contribution and demand-supply gap

The contribution of institutional credit to agricultural growth has been estimated in the state of Punjab. The demand-supply situation under different scenarios and change therein over a decade period have been examined. A simultaneous (four) equation model has been used to estimate the contribution of institutional credit towards use of production inputs, private investments and agricultural growth. The study has revealed that supply of production credit doubled and that of investment credit increased by about 80 per cent during the period 2001-02 to 2003-04. It took more than 15 years to double from 1984-85 to 2000-01. The relationship between use of variable inputs and production credit disbursement has been found highly significant. A similar relationship has prevailed between private capital formation and investment credit. The results have further exhibited significant and positive impact of capital investments on productivity with elasticity of 1.02. Higher use of inputs was ushered by favourable input-output pricing policy along with easy and cheap short-term credit availability in the state. Private capital formation has also helped in increasing the use of variable inputs in the crop sector. The contribution of institutional credit in promoting use of modern production inputs and private capital investments has been found to be significantly positive. The demand-supply situation in terms of short-term institutional credit has undergone a change over time, with the demand exceeding supply by 49 per cent in 1995-96, but later, the supply has been found exceeding demand by 122 per cent in the year 2005-06. It, therefore, becomes imperative that first the demand for agricultural credit in each state/region be assessed, depending on crop patterns and current inputs and capital requirements in relation to targeted output growth-rate and then, policy framework should be put in place to meet those requirements, instead of increasing the credit supply uniformly across the board in all the states/ regions of the country. Such a policy sometimes proves counterproductive and that appears to have happened in the Punjab agriculture.Agricultural Finance,

Optimal Crop Plans for Sustainable Water Use in Punjab

A linear programming model has been formulated to suggest the optimal cropping pattern for maximizing net returns and ensuring significant savings of groundwater with the aim of sustaining groundwater use in the Punjab agriculture. The primary data obtained from the project, “Comprehensive scheme to study the cost of cultivation of principal crops in Punjab†for the year 2002-03 pertain to 170 farmers selected through three-stage stratified random sampling technique. As the period of transplantation of paddy has a significant bearing on the amount of groundwater used and its sustainability, the paddy crop has been further classified into Paddy 1 (transplanted before 10th June); Paddy 2 (transplanted during 11th June to 20th June) and Paddy 3 (transplanted after 20th June). At the existing level of water availability, the optimal crop plan has not revealed any significant changes in the production pattern. Restricting the availability of groundwater has resulted into a major shift in the cropping pattern. Such changes could ensure groundwater savings of almost 25 per cent, without any adverse impact on the net returns from crop production. Introduction of new crops in the production plan, such as Bt cotton, has further enhanced the returns from crop production by about 4 per cent along with groundwater savings of 26.55 per cent. The study has suggested that alternate wetting and drying, adoption of system of rice intensification (SRI), use of tensiometers and direct plantation of paddy are some of the other techniques which can save water.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Rural Employment and Income: The Inter-household Variations in Punjab

The employment pattern and income sources have been reported in the rural areas of Punjab, based on the primary data collected from 315 rural households. The results have revealed a negative relationship between employment diversification and size of landholding. Distress nature of the rural labour markets has induced casualization of work in the absence of land for cultivation. A majority of the households have been found dependent on multiple sources of income, further confirming the distress nature of these income sources. The dependence on non-farm sector as a major source of income has revealed a negative relationship with the land-size. More than two-thirds (66.9%) of the non-cultivating households have non-farm sector as the major source of their income. The results have further revealed the inability of an average non-cultivating and marginal or small cultivating household to achieve the overall average income of a rural household. The rural household income has been found to follow a highly skewed distribution. The incomes from crops and dairying have been observed highly unequally distributed, perhaps due to their strong association with the size of landholding. On the other hand, rural non-farm income distribution seems to be least skewed.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Supply Chain Analysis of Onion and Cauliflower in Punjab

The present study was conducted in Rajpura block of Patiala district in Punjab with a sample of 50 vegetables growers. The total cost of cultivation was estimated at Rs 49563/ha for onion and Rs 34840/ha for cauliflower. The net returns were found higher for onion (Rs 74597/ha) as compared to that from cauliflower (Rs 38072/ha). Majority of these vegetables were being disposed off through commission agent/wholesaler (more than 90 per cent) followed by retailer and directly to the consumer. The efficiency of the these market channels can be enhanced through competition by organized retail chains and modernizing the vegetable market system in the state. The wholesale markets of Pune, Ludhiana and Patiala for onion and that of Shimla, Ludhiana and Patiala for cauliflower have been found integrated with price of onion and cauliflower transmitting quickly from the independent to the dependent markets. The highest elasticity of price transmission in onion has been observed between Ludhiana and Patiala markets with almost 90 per cent of the price change in Ludhiana getting transmitted to the Patiala market. Such transmission has been 100 per cent for cauliflower between Shimla and Patiala markets. The price transmission has been observed faster in cauliflower than onion. Though a long-term equilibrium relationship exists between all the studied markets in terms of weekly price of the two vegetables crops, there also exists a short-run disequilibrium between some of the market pairs with almost 15 to 25 per cent of the fluctuations usually getting corrected within a week. Greater integration in these markets may help the farmers as well as consumers of the vegetables through better price signals.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Analysis and Design of Tuned Turbo Codes

It has been widely observed that there exists a fundamental trade-off between the minimum (Hamming) distance properties and the iterative decoding convergence behavior of turbo-like codes. While capacity achieving code ensembles typically are asymptotically bad in the sense that their minimum distance does not grow linearly with block length, and they therefore exhibit an error floor at moderate-to-high signal to noise ratios, asymptotically good codes usually converge further away from channel capacity. In this paper, we introduce the concept of tuned turbo codes, a family of asymptotically good hybrid concatenated code ensembles, where asymptotic minimum distance growth rates, convergence thresholds, and code rates can be traded-off using two tuning parameters, {\lambda} and {\mu}. By decreasing {\lambda}, the asymptotic minimum distance growth rate is reduced in exchange for improved iterative decoding convergence behavior, while increasing {\lambda} raises the asymptotic minimum distance growth rate at the expense of worse convergence behavior, and thus the code performance can be tuned to fit the desired application. By decreasing {\mu}, a similar tuning behavior can be achieved for higher rate code ensembles.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor