Relationship between Personal, Socioeconomic and Psychological Characteristics of FPO Beneficiaries with their Attitude towards FPO in Tamil Nadu, India

Agriculture in India is predominantly production oriented and plays a pivotal role in the Indian economy. Even though lack of advancement, poor management of supply chains and shrinking average farm holding sizes all slow down this progress. As a result of its awareness of these problems facing small and marginal farmers, the Indian government is actively promoting Farmers Producer Organisations. FPO help small and marginal farmers integrate so they can raise their incomes and improve their economic standing. The present investigation was conducted with the aim of analysing the attitude towards Farmer Producer Organisations with the personal, socioeconomic, and psychological characteristics of the respondents. It was conducted three districts namely Coimbatore, Erode and Trichy in the state of Tamil Nadu (India). From each selected FPO, 100 beneficiaries were selected randomly with simple random sampling technique. In this way total of 300 beneficiaries were considered as respondent for the study.

The results shows that the majority of the respondents had revealed that majority of the respondents were middle aged, had higher secondary school level education, had agriculture as their primary occupation, belonged small farmers category, possessed medium level of farming experience and had medium level annual income. Majority of the respondents had medium level of extension agency contact, mass media exposure, information source utilization, information sharing behaviour, achievement motivation, economic motivation, credibility, innovativeness and market orientation. Most of the respondents participated in more than two trainings and made their decision independently.

Regarding the relationship between personal, socioeconomic and psychological characteristics of beneficiaries and their attitude level, twelve variables viz., educational status, occupational status, annual income, extension agency contact, mass media exposure, information source utilization, achievement motivation, economic motivation, credibility, decision making pattern, market orientation and training undergone were found to have positive and significant relationship with the attitude.