Technical Efficiency and Its Determinants in Production of Cropping Systems in Kolar District, Karnataka

Technical efficiency was examined by collecting data from Kolar district of Karnataka under four distinct groups viz., vegetable-based small (VS), vegetable-based large (VL), cereal-based small (CS) and cereal-based large (CL) cropping systems by adopting multistage purposive cum random sampling technique. Data Envelopment analysis (DEA) was used for estimating the technical efficiency and the results indicated that nearly 38.33 per cent of farms under assumption of constant returns to scale performed with the efficiency level equal to 0.9 or greater, i.e., 46 out of 120 farmers in the entire cropping system. Distribution of farms in three regions of production frontier revealed that majority of farms i.e., 70 per cent of the farms in VS, 60 per cent in VL, 77 per cent in CS and 67 per cent in CL systems were found to be operating in the region of increasing returns or the suboptimal region. The production scale of these farms can increased while decreasing costs, since they were performing below the optimum production scale.