Constraints Faced by Potato Contract Farmers in the Northern District of West Bengal, India: An RBQ Method Approach

Abstract

The present paper analyses the constraints faced by potato contract farmers in the Coochbehar district of West Bengal. It followed an ex-post-facto research design. The study was conducted from January 2023 to April 2023. The purposive, multistage, and random sampling method was followed. The Coochbehar II block was selected purposively. Out of thirteen, five-gram panchayats were randomly chosen, and ten villages within them were randomly selected for the study. Further ten farmers from each village, totalling to 100 respondents, were randomly selected for the study. Data was collected through personal interviews with responses gathered in Bengali and recorded in English. In this study, the “Rank Based Quotient” (RBQ) method was used to rank the constraints faced by the contract farmers in the study area. The constraints listed were inefficient organizers, low yield, no pre-fixed visits by company field executives, difficult leftover disposal, high cost of cultivation, delayed payment schedule, inclement weather, labour shortage during peak period, manipulated grading and weighing of produce, monopoly of field executives and vendors.