Vol. 10, Special Issue 12 (2021)

Author(s):
Sayanton Mondal, Vijay K Choudhary and Bitan Mondal

Abstract:
Farmer Producer Organisations or Companies have gained immense popularity in the last few years for its success based upon collective action approaches. Pooling of resources presents numerous opportunities for the farmers as it smoothens the marketing process by eliminating the middlemen from the market, establishes direct contact with consumers and producers, help the farmers to get more than the remunerative price. Besides that, it presents farming as an enterprise to the farmers rather than a subsistence way of living. The Government of India has approved and launched the Central Sector Scheme of “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs)” to form and promote 10,000 new FPOs till 2027-28 with a total budgetary outlay of Rs.6865 Cr. Initially one FPO is allocated per block. So far, a total of 4465 new FPOs produce clusters have been allocated to Implementing Agencies for formation of FPOs, of which a total of 632 no. of FPOs have been registered. In West Bengal, the first FPO established in 2012 under SFAC in Nadia district followed by another FPO in Birbhum district in the same year. Since then a total of 151 FPOs under NABARD and 89 FPOs under SFAC have been established so far. Hence, this study was carried out in 2021 to study the present status and growth of FPOs in West Bengal. The compound annual growth rate of FPOs under NABARD and SFAC has been calculated. Also, the distribution of FPOs across the state was analysed. It was found that 63% FPOs comes under NABARD whereas 37% FPOs comes under SFAC. NABARD has identified several districts and blocks for further expansion of the FPOs.