Covid 19 - Risk management and technical efficiency of farmers post migration of agricultural labour in India

The sudden spread of COVID-19 across the globe during 2020 severely impacted efficient use of inputs for production in all the sectors in most of the developing countries including India This paper tries to evaluate technical efficiency of paddy producers by applying the model of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) under time invariant fixed effect application To measure the level of technical inefficiency of farmers with family and hired labour with the help of primary data collected from 200 farmers in a field survey in the state of Haryana Maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) was deployed to estimate the model of production under the assumption of Cobb-Douglas model of production function with stochastic frontier analysis for the variables affecting the technical efficiency Results show that the important variables that impact the technical efficiency are the cost of labour, seed, fertilizers, machine labour and irrigation charges Average technical efficiency of the surveyed paddy farmers that used both family and hired labour are 0 73 (73 per cent) and 0 69 (69 per cent) during COVID-19 and before Covid-19 respectively Farmers have enhanced their level of technical efficiency during COVID-19 by optimally utilizing family labour This shows that the small agricultural land holders can reduce the level of input requirement by 41 percent for giving the same level of output if their cultivation practices are technically more efficient © 2020 DAV College All rights reserved