• Dr. Dilip Rasiklal Vahoniya
• Saurabh K Radadiya
• Mahesh R. Prajapati

Background: Agriculture, with its allied sectors, is the largest source of livelihood in India, 70 percent of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 82 percent of farmers being small and marginal [4]. Since these farmers are scattered individuals, they don’t have bargaining power, access to credit, crop insurance, agricultural inputs, improved technology and equipment, less availability of advisory, market information, and knowledge, including low productivity and limited access to finance [9]. Keeping in mind the important issues of farmers, and agriculturalists (jointly termed as producers), the concept of ‘Producer Company (PC)’ was declared in 2002. Producer Company refers to a legal form for farmers with the aim of improving the living standard, status, better income, and profitability of the farmers. A Producer company owns the characteristics and regulatory framework of a cooperative society and a private limited company [2]. Methodology: In this study, three districts were chosen purposively namely Kota, Baran, and Jhalawar covering 10 Producer companies, and FPCs are gauged through various parameters such as governance, outreach, compliance, HRD, Operation, Marketing, account & finance, technology & services, Socio-economic factors and structured schedule used to collect the data. The study conducted interviews with the Member Farmer, CEO and Director of the FPCs functioning in the Kota, Baran, and Jhalawar districts of Rajasthan to learn more about their experiences with the FPCs and to draw broader implications for the FPCs as an organizational structure for tackling the problems that small and marginal farmers face. Therefore, the present study was conducted to study the profile of FPCs and to find out the problems faced by the FPCs. Result: It was observed that 6 FPCs out of 10 started in 2016, six were supported by NABARD, and five were working in more than 30 villages. It was observed that all FPCs had an active membership base of up to 60 %, only one FPC was self-promoted out of the ten FPCs, and from the governance point of view of the FPCs, there was only one FPC with more than 50% number of the women BODs out of the total number of BOD in the FPC. It was discovered from the study that all ten FPCs were engaged in the input business, out of ten FPCs, nine FPCs were engaged in the output business and one FPC was providing soil testing facilities to their member farmers. Only two FPCs were offering CHC services to member farmers. It was found that working capital requirements followed by market linkage and timeliness in the supply of inputs (shortage of inputs) were the major deterrent for all the FPCs. Most of the FPCs found difficulties in both backward and forward market linkage. Maintaining member databases, capacity building of members, and output aggregation difficulty were some of the minor challenges faced by FPCs. Inadequate professional management, weak financial aspects, insufficient access to credit, insufficient access to the market, lack of proper infrastructure, and lack of technical skills were some of the common problems faced by FPOs today.

FPO, FPC

"Study on Profile and Problems faced by Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) in Selected Districts of Rajasthan ", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 11, page no.b358-b371, November-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2211163.pdf

"Study on Profile and Problems faced by Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) in Selected Districts of Rajasthan ", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 11, page no. ppb358-b371, November-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2211163.pdf