Browsing by Author "Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari"

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    Agricultural credit and rural development : A study of the patterns of credit demand and supply in the farm sector of jalpaiguri district in West Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2023) Aich, Partha Sarathi; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
    The term “Development” is a value based and subjective concept which implies revealing untapped potential powers. In general terms, development means revealing favourable changes in set of vector of desirable social objectives which does not diminish over time. Within the comprehensive set development, the term “rural development” is a subset that exposes the overall development of agriculture and allied activities, village and cottage industries, village crafts, physical infrastructure, community services, natural and human capital in rural areas. In particular terms, rural development involves helping downtrodden small scale farmers, tenants and the landless people to seek a livelihood in the rural areas so as to control fruits of rural development. The rural economy of India is predominantly agrarian in character. The agricultural subsector comprises crops cultivation, animal husbandry, dairying, fishing, poultry and forestry whereas small-scale rural industries, rural business and services belong to non-agricultural subsector. The Indian agriculture sector is fraught with several difficulties such as low factor productivity, low capital-labour ratio, long gestation period, small uneconomic land holdings, high vulnerability and risks to natural calamities, non-remunerative prices of farm produce, poor post-harvest infrastructure, high incidence of poverty, prevalence of illiterate and unskilled workforce as well as lack of modern amenities. During the post-independence period, favourable factors that contributed to the remarkable agricultural growth are the increased use of agricultural inputs, technological change and paradigm shift in institutional framework. Among all factor inputs, farm credit is considered as the most vital input for agricultural and rural development. At national level, two events such as the introduction of the new agricultural technology by the end of 1960’s and nationalization of commercial banks in 1969 led to the paradigm shift in institutional credit supply mechanism. However, the nationwide implementation of financial reform measures during 90’s and thereafter resulted in decline of credit flow and squeeze on resource availability for agricultural activities due to strict implementation of Basel norms. In the context of the present research study, a micro-level analysis on the basis of primary data has been conducted in the context of Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal. The district is located in the most northern part of the state and the economy is mainly based on agriculture and tea gardens. Apart from tea production, principle crops are paddy, wheat, maize, potato and jute respectively. Of the total workforce in the state, the share of cultivators and agricultural labourers constitute nearly 17 percent and 26 percent respectively. The majority number of people engaged in cultivation works belongs to small and marginal farmers’ category with average land holding size of 1.24 hectares only. The period of 90’s, saw limited additions to the number of service branches of commercial banks. However, the period beyond 2010-11 was marked by spread of bank branches at statutory and census towns to fulfill the needs and aspirations of needy farmers and small scale entrepreneurs. It has been observed from various previous research studies that much emphasis was put on the operational efficiency of Regional Rural Banks, performance of SHG–Bank linked micro–credit programme, rural poverty and unemployment issues, agrarian indebtedness and so on. But, such academic studies did not focus much in a systematic way into the issues on patterns of credit demand and supply in the farm sector of Jalpaiguri district. Therefore, during the course of research study, emphasis has been put on disaggregated trends of institutional farm credit flow at the national and state level, demand-side factors that account for variations in farmer households’ demand for credit and credit supply patterns from institutional agencies. The present research study has also dealt with various aspects of non-institutional credit market with respect to landholding patterns, farming practices, rural caste-structure and infrastructure set-up prevailing at sampled areas of study district. At the macro level, the period after 2004-05 witnessed gradual rise in rural and semi-rural bank branches accompanied by sharp rise in credit flow to agriculture sector. From 2001 to 2011, 17 major states from western, southern and northern India occupied major share of overall credit outstanding to agriculture between 2005 and 2015 period. On the other hand, in the eastern and north-eastern states the growth of credit outstanding to agricultural sector was negative in the 1990’s followed by moderate rise after the 2000-01 period. The state of West Bengal acts as the nodal state for the entire eastern and north-eastern states. The state alone contributes 40 percent of the entire region’s GDP. The state is home for nearly 72 lakh farm families of whom 96 percent belongs to small and marginal farmers’ category. The farmers in West Bengal are less creditworthy than southern and northern states while wide inter-district variations exist in credit delivery status. The credit-deposit ratio of the state stands below the national average of 74 percent meaning banks in the state provide less amount of credit than they mobilize savings deposits from the people. In nutshell, Development is a subjective matter and no general consensus can be reached about its proper meaning. The term rural development being a sub-component implies the overall development of rural areas encompassing agriculture, allied activities and non-farm sector. This research study intends to present a critical analysis on various aspects of agriculture and rural development of Jalpaiguri district. The main objective of this research study is to identify the existing institutional and physical infrastructure facilities at rural areas and their potentialities for the future development of rural sector of the study district. The present research study has also been carried out with wider application of different statistical tools and techniques to portray patterns of institutional credit flow to farm sector and farmer’s demand behaviour pertaining to credit sourced from both institutional and non-institutional agents in the study area. With such wider application of statistical tools and techniques on sample data, suitable conclusions with constructive measures have been prescribed for the holistic improvement of rural sector in the study area.
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    Economics of health care utilisation : a study of perceived morbidity and health seeking patterns in Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts of North Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2006) Majumdar, Amlan; Sankrityayana, Jeta; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
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    Food security and poverty : a case study of tea gardens in North Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2023) Chakraborty, Abhijit; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
    Food Security has attracted a lot of interest in the economic literature, especially in recent years1. One of the ways to measure poverty is food security. Since minimum calorie intake is a basis for measuring poverty. Food security on the other hand is defined as “Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’’2. Thus, if enough food is not available, we would call a certain population food insecure. On the other hand, out of the various measures of poverty the basic needs approach tries to identify the nutritional requirement as per person calorie requirement and then convert it into monetary terms to determine a poverty line(Atkinson 2019). The other method is the capability approach as proposed by Amartya Sen which tries to explain poverty in terms of basic capabilities or functioning. The basic needs approach is an old theory. The poverty literature also identifies the measurement issues under two broad heads one is the direct method and the other is the indirect method. The direct method takes into consideration the shortfall in minimum calorie requirement, whereas the indirect method takes into consideration the income required to satisfy the minimum calorie required3. The minimum calories required for basic sustenance are used as a method for determining poverty lines in many countries4. There is also a vast literature which has tried to identify the relation between food security and poverty(Kakwani and Son 2016). The interest by economists in the hypothesis of calorie intake and its effect on income is central to the efficiency wage hypothesis, proposed by Leibenstein (Leibenstein 1957). The seminal work states that the efficiency of work depends on wages, which comes from nutrition (Dawson, Tiffin 1998) and thereby nutrition will play a major role in the country. Thus, we can claim there is a relationship between poverty and food security. In India, the poverty line is determined using the minimum calorie approach and therefore we state that people falling below a certain calorie norm are considered to be food insecure. The required dietary allowance or the recommended calorie at the poverty line is usually taken from the RDA proposed by ICMR. We use the direct method to determine the extent of poverty and thus food security in our surveyed population. The research hypothesis we propose are: Research Hypothesis • Poverty and food security are related, poverty leads to food insecurity and food insecurity leads to poverty. • Tea gardens of North Bengal exhibit marked regional disparities in terms of food security and poverty • PDS has helped to address the problems of Food Insecurity in the Tea Gardens of North Bengal. • Other determinants of Food Security show that there exists food insecurity in Tea Plantations Research Questions: • What is the present socio-economic status of the Tea Plantation workers in the selected gardens? • What is the role of the public distribution system in India in mitigating food security? • How has the PDS evolved in the tea gardens? • Is Poverty and Food Security related? • Are the people in Tea Gardens suffering from undernourishment? • What are the other determinants of Food Security? We use household-level data to test the hypothesis. We also determined the other factors that might affect food security. We find evidence that food security and poverty are indeed related. Results also show high incidence of undernutrition among the Tea plantations, which is a core indicator of food security. Our analysis suggests among the various determinants of food security, the most important are household size and education.
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    The Infrastructural linkages of transport policy: a study of the wagon economics of Indian railway freight operations
    (University of North Bengal, 2002) Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari; Sanskriyayana, Jeta Dasgupta, Biplab
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    Socio-economic aspects of migration from rural India: study of West Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2019) Das, Yasodhara; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari; Ramachandran, V. K.
    This thesis is concerned with short term/seasonal/circular migration for work from rural India. It attempts to describe and critically analyse the magnitude of such migration from the available secondary and primary sources of data and will try to bring out the relevance of such migration from rural West Bengal. According to the 64th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) on Employment, Unemployment and Migration (2007-8) there were 324 million internal migrants in India, which is almost 29 per cent of the total population, 140 million of whom were workers. On the remittance front, the NSS estimates reveal that international remittances received in India comprised about half of the domestic remittances received. The results also indicate that ninety-one per cent of migrants in rural areas and 59 per cent of migrants in urban areas in India had migrated from a rural region. Rural migrants thus constitute a large proportion of short-term /seasonal/circularmigrants who move for work/employment related reasons.The 55th (1999-2000) and the 64th rounds (2007-8) of the NSSO tried to quantify short duration migration.Estimates of short-term migrants vary from 15 million (NSSO 2007–8) to 40 million (Srivastava, 2011) to 100 million (Deshingkar and Akter 2009). Research on the socio-economic characteristics of this stream of migrant workers and the impact of migrant earnings on the rural household incomes, is thus necessary for an understanding of this crucial segment of India‘s labour force. A brief overview of the chapters of this thesis is given below: The first chapter introduces the research topic; reviews the available literature relevant to the study, states the research questions and the research methodology followed during study.The second chapter is intended to describe and critically evaluate the results obtained from the secondary database available i.e. the Census and the NSS surveys and compare their methodology with that of various primary surveys on internal migration. The third chapter is intended to describe and critically evaluate the results obtained from the secondary database i.e. the NSS survey with special focus on West Bengal. The fourth chapter introduces the villages which will be studied as the origin of the migrant worker. For this purpose I study the villages of West Bengal which were surveyed by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies as part of the 2010 West Bengal Round survey of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI). The fifth chapter is intended to compare the socio-economic conditions of migrant and non-migrant households in the study villages. The sixth chapter analyses the difference between migrant and non-migrant households with respect to rural household incomes. The seventh chapter studies the migrant worker at the destination. The samples for this study are the migrant construction workers from West Bengal who migrate to the Ernakulam district of Kerala. The demographic and socio-economic characteristicsof migrant workers is studied in this chapter. The final chapter summarizes the specific findings of the chapters of the thesis.
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    A Study of some selected economic activities of rural women in Barpeta district of Assam
    (University of North Bengal, 2012) Sarma, Jagadish Chandra; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
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    A Study of Utilisation of Healthcare Services by Women Belonging to the Reproductive Age Group in Jalpaiguri District of West Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2024) Banerjee, Amrita; Majumder, Amlan; Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
    The healthcare utilisation behaviour theory pertains to the various reactions individuals exhibit in response to states of poor health. If an individual desires good health, then demand for healthcare services increases, in other words, utilisation of healthcare services increases. The study examines healthcare utilisation among rural women in Jalpaiguri district, considering their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. The analysis is based on a sample of 627 women covering 406 households. The study shows that out of 958 illness episodes in the Jalpaiguri district, 70.56 per cent (676 episodes) of women utilised at least one healthcare facility, while 29.43 per cent (282 episodes) did not seek any healthcare during the twelve-month reference period. The majority of women in the district preferred modern healthcare facilities, with traditional approaches being used for a limited number of illness episodes.
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    Women’s Economic Security and Property Rights: Some Current Issues
    (University of North Bengal, 2014-03) Roy Mukherjee, Sanchari
    While it has long been recognised within the gender discourse that the perpetuation of unequal property structures stems from the need for patriarchal institutions to exercise power over land both as a productive resource and as well as a store of wealth, the legal literature on property rights generally leaves the gender characteristics of property rights undefined, thus failing to recognise that intrahousehold inequalities in property rights impinge upon the distribution of rights and responsibilities within and also without the household. The paper tracks down how property rights issue has largely been neglected in gender discourse and charts out how the issue could be reinstated at the centre of women’s movement.