Abstract

The present study attempted to analyse the efficiency level of paddy farms in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu state in India. The input oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was employed to estimate technical, pure technical, scale, allocative and economic efficiency in the selected paddy farms. The results of the study showed that there exist potential for increasing the paddy output further by 20 percent in the farm holdings by following the best-practices of efficient farms. The study also revealed that 36 percent of the farm were operating at optimal scale and more than seventy per cent of the farms were operating below 50 percent of allocative and economic efficiency levels. The findings also indicated that all the farm inputs were used excessively by the sample farms; the excessive use of nitrogen and women labour was found in the case of fifty percent of the sample farms.

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