Vol. 11, Special Issue 12 (2022)

In India, agriculture is dominated by marginal and small farmers, own nearly 86.08% of all operational landholdings (Agriculture Census 2015-16). In Assam also more than 80% of the population is directly or indirectly related to agriculture. Lack of proper marketing infrastructure, the existence of middlemen, and a lack of collectivization efforts make it difficult to take advantage of marketing possibilities and generate as much revenue. The Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) concept was created and put into practise to address this issue. The present study is a modest attempt to study the impact of FPOs on farmer’s income. Data on the socioeconomic characteristics and specifics of the sample farmers' farming operations were gathered from both FPO members and non-members. To ascertain the elements encouraging the farmers to join as group members, binary logistic regression was performed. To research how FPOs affect farmers' income multiple linear regression was applied by incorporating the participation of the farmers in FPO as a dependent variable. Again, to check whether there is a significant difference in income of the members over non-members t-test was done. The study found that younger and more educated farmers are more likely to participate in FPOs. The membership in FPOs influences the outcome variable (income) positively and significantly at 1% level. The study suggested that there should be a proper mechanism for selecting the farmers in case of formation of FIG’s based on cropping pattern. To maximize the price receive for the produce; the FPOs can come up with the idea of product differentiation and finally, to adopt an incentive-based model so that each farmer in a group will participate actively which will automatically reduce the problem of free-riding to some extent.