Comparative Performance of Farmers' Service Societies and Primary Agricultural Cooperative Credit Societies

This paper analyses performance of Farmers’ Service Societies (FSS) and Primary Agricultural Cooperative Credit Societies (PACS) comparatively. Features of these two field-level rural financial institutions (RFIs) are described in Section-II. Section-III conceptualizes performance criteria. Section-IV discusses application of these criteria and analyses the empirical results. Major conclusion of the paper is that FSS have performed better than PACS. But both these RFIs have not succeeded in undertaking agro-marketing and processing. Implications of these findings are discussed in the last section.