Chickpea: Economic study on measuring efficiency of used resource in Auraiya dist. of U.P.

Chickpea is one of the important crop in U.P. as well as, in India. World-wide India ranks 1stin production of chickpea. In India, the total food production in 2013-14 was about 257.4 million tones out of these only 19.3 million tones was contributed by pulses. The production of cereals increase by 460 per cent since 1950-51 to give the year but the production of pulses in the country has increased only 178 per cent. There is acute shortage of pulses in the country. The prices have increased considerably and the consumer is hard hit to buy his pulse requirements. Thus the availability of pulse per capita per day has proportionately decline from 71g (1955) to 36.9g (1998) against the minimum requirement of 70g per capita per day. District Auraiya was purposively selected and the block Auraiya having highest acreage under gram was selected purposively for the study. List of the villages from selected block were prepared along with acreage under Chickpea cultivation and 5 villages were selected randomly for study. In all 100 number of farmers were selected proportionally from each category of farmers and classified into three categories i.e. marginal (below 1 ha), small (1-2 ha) and medium (2-4 ha & above). The data were collected by personal interview technique with the help of pre-tested structured schedule. The period of enquiry pertain to the agricultural year 2017-18.Cobb-Douglas production function was applied for estimating resource use efficiency of chickpea cultivation The study revealed diminishing return to scale as sum of elasticities were deserved less than unity in case of all categories. The included factors in functional analysis viz. X1, X2, X3 and X4 representing per ha. Value of seed, manures and fertilizers, human labour and tractor/ machinery charges (Rs.) respectively. High value of R2 (coefficient of multiple determination) ranging from 0.81 to 0.84 was observed, which explaining that 81 to 84 percent variation in yield of chickpea crop is explained by included factors in the study area. MVP(Marginal Value Productivity) of all included factors were found more than unity, explaining that these are further scope of these factors to realizing optimum production. It is inferred that chickpea cultivation is suitable for upgrading food security mission of India.