The delivery of livestock services is emerging as an important priority area due to increasing demand of livestock and its products for enhancing and optimizing livestock production. Quality in livestock services forms the basis of sustainable development of farmer. These services make an indispensable contribution to the physical, mental and social welfare of humans (Prabhaharan, 2000). Effective and efficient delivery of animal health and production services is considered as vital for gainful livestock development and hence, efficient delivery of livestock services has become a subject of rising concern to many national and international organizations including FAO (Kleeman, 1999). There is a growing demand among producers and consumers for veterinary services to protect the health of animals and the safety of products of animal origin for both domestic and international markets.

Since independence in India, the livestock service delivery is under the control of public sector and the major agencies dealing with livestock extension service are Directorate of Extension (Ministry of Agriculture), Indian Council of Agricultural Research, National Dairy Development Board, Krishi Vigyan Kendra, State Agricultural and Veterinary Universities and State Department of Animal Husbandry. In addition, national and regional level extension services are also provided by private agencies, Dairy Cooperatives and NGOs (GOI, 2006).

The plethora of studies (Ravikumar et al., 2007; Jagadeeshwary, 2003 and Rajashree, 2000) has indicated that State Department of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Services are the main and primary provider of livestock services apart from other private and cooperative service providers. The government maintains a large public infrastructure on livestock services, but there are questions about the service utility and reach to the livestock producers (Planning Commission, 2007). A major challenge for delivery of livestock services in India is the provision of adequate services of an acceptable standard or quality. In this background, it was felt important to know the perception of livestock farmers towards existing livestock service delivery systems.

Materials and Methods

The present study was conducted in purposively selected Jaipur district of Rajasthan. Out of 16 tehsils of Jaipur district, four tehsils viz. Phulera, Amber, Chomu and Jamwa Ramgarh were selected purposively on the basis of higher livestock population and presence of different livestock service delivery systems like dairy cooperative societies, public and private livestock service providers, private dairies, milk vendors, public veterinary health centers and other agencies. In the next stage of sampling, three villages were selected randomly from each selected tehsil making a total of 12 villages. Ten livestock farmers availing the services of different livestock service providers were selected randomly from each village. Thus, a total of 120 respondents were selected and interviewed personally. A structured schedule was developed which contain 20 statements including sixteen positive and four negative for measuring the perception of livestock farmers towards livestock service delivery systems. The responses were recorded on a five point continuum representing strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, and strongly disagree with scores of 5,4,3,2, and 1 for positive statements and vice-versa for negative statements, respectively. The maximum and minimum obtainable score was 100 and 20 respectively.After getting the total perception score of each respondent, they were classified into three groups as less favourable, favourable and more favourable on the basis of mean and standard deviation.Correlation coefficient was used to study the relationship between independent variables and perception of livestock farmers towards livestock services delivery systems.

Results and Discussion

Personal Attributes of the Respondents

The study of personal attributes was carried with reference to age, education, category, religion, occupation, family size, family type, land holding, herd size, annual gross income, experience in livestock farming, extension contact, mass media exposure, social participation and economic motivation.

Table 1: Distribution of respondents according to their personal attributes (n=120)

It is evident from Table 1 that majority of the respondents (70.00%) belonged to middle age group followed by old (20.00%) and young (10.00%) age group with average age of 44.25 years. These observations are in conformity with the findings of Gautam et al. (2007); Halder (2008); Tiwari and Upadhya (2012); Kathiriya et al. (2013) and Jhirwal et al. (2018) who reported that majority of the respondents were in the middle age group. As regards to education, majority of the respondents (40.00%) were illiterate followed by graduate & above (18.34%) and middle level (14.17%). This finding is in corroboration with that of Kathiriya et al. (2013). However, this finding is in contradiction with the results of Tiwari and Upadhya (2012). It was also found that majority of the respondents (55.84%) belonged to other backward caste followed by general caste (33.33%), schedule caste (7.50%) and schedule tribe (3.33%). This finding is in contradiction with that of Rewani and Tochhawng (2014) who revealed that majority of the respondents belonged to schedule tribe category. As regards to category, all the respondents (100.00 %) belonged to Hindu religion and none of the respondents were from Muslim, Jain, Sikh or Christian community. With respect to occupation, a larger percentage of the respondents had agriculture as the primary occupation (60.84 %) and livestock rearing as their secondary occupation (75.83 %). Regarding family size, majority of respondents (45.00 %) had medium size families followed by small (35.00%) and large size families (20.00%) with average family size of 6.88 members. This finding is not in consonance with the earlier findings of Gautam et al. (2007).

Table 1 further indicates that majority of the respondents (63.33 %) were living in nuclear family system followed by joint family (36.67 %). The reason for this may be due to modern thinking about freedom and privacy that may not be possible in joint families. This finding is not in line with that of Kathiriya et al. (2013) who reported that majority of the respondents were having joint family. As regards to land holding, majority of the respondents (55.83 %) were having small land holding followed by marginal (26.67%) with average land holding of 1.67 hectares. With respect to herd size, majority of the respondents (83.33%) had medium size of herd followed by large (10.84 %) and small (5.83%) herd size with average herd size of 9.65 animals. The majority of respondents (66.67 %) were in the medium income group followed by low (18.33%) and high (15.00 %) income groups with average annual gross income of187141.70 INR per year. Results further of level of experience in livestock farming (63.33%), extension contact (64.16%), mass media exposure (68.33 %), social participation (66.67 %) and economic motivation (66.66 %).

Perception of Livestock Farmers towards Livestock Service Delivery Systems

The perception of livestock farmers towards existinglivestock service delivery systems has been analyzed in Table 2. A persual of this table reveals that a great majority of livestock farmers were in agreement with positive statements about livestock service delivery systems like livestock service delivery systems have empowered the decision-making process (79.17%), giving opportunities for skill development (75.00%), helping to enhance livestock production (68.33%), providing services to livestock-related income-generating activities (65.00%), acquired a distinguishable increment in knowledge among farmers (62.50%), giving need-based services (52.50%), giving wide information on new advancements (50.00%) and conducting need-based training programmes (45.00%).

Table 2: Distribution of livestock farmers on the basis of their perception towards livestock service delivery systems (n=120)

SA: Strongly agree; A: Agree; UD: Undecided; DA: Disagree and SDA: Strongly Disagree; *Negative Statements

On the other hand, most of the livestock farmers were in disagreement with the positive statements like present livestock service delivery systems are giving services round the clock (71.66 %), partial towards large farmers (56.67 %), subsidies in purchasing animals are satisfactory (55.00 %), services can be productive to the livestock farmers only when they change into paid services (54.17 %), vary with the number of livestock owned by a farmer (48.33 %), service providers are visiting livestock farms consistently (39.17 %) and having sufficient staff in delivering the services (37.50 %). Most of the livestock farmers were in agreement with the negative statements like livestock services are not up to the grass root level (62.50 %) and not carrying out follow up actions regularly (60.00 %). Whereas, most of the livestock farmers were in disagreement with the negative statements like livestock service delivery systems are not giving market information (51.67 %) and not distributing farm literature (46.67 %). Majority of the respondents had no opinion about the statement like livestock service delivery systems are giving more importance to organized farmers group (75.00 %). The results presented in Table 3 suggests that majority of the livestock farmers (70.00%) had favourable perception towards livestock service delivery systems followed by 15.83 per cent with less favourable and 14.17 per cent with more favourable perception. This result is in accordance with Deekshit et al. (2017) who observed that majority of the respondents had the medium level of perception on service delivery systems followed by low and high levels, respectively.

Table 3:  Overall perception of livestock farmers towards livestock service delivery systems (n=120)

Relationship Between Selected Independent Variables and Perception of Livestock Farmers Towards Livestock Service Delivery Systems

The data presented in Table 4 indicates that age, annual gross income, experience in livestock farming and mass media exposure had positive and non-significant relationship with perception of livestock farmers towards livestock service delivery systems, while education, family size and land holding had negative and non-significant relationship. Herd size, extension contact and social participation had positive and significant relationship with perception of livestock farmers towards livestock service delivery systems.

Table 4: Pearson’s correlation for perception of livestock farmerstowards livestock service delivery systems with independent variables

** Significant at 1 per cent level; * Significant at 5 per cent level

Different age categories of farmers might have developed a non significant perception towards the livestock service delivery systems which may be due to the reason that the different services provided by them can be accessed by the farmers without age difference. Different respondents belonging to the different level of education status had different perspectives such as knowledge, information and services availability, which would have lead to the negative association between education and perception towards livestock service delivery systems. Negative association of family size and farmers’ perception may be attributed to the fact that as the number of family members increases their responsibility for getting the various services decreases. Negative association of land holding with farmers’ perception might be due to the reason that resondents with more land may neglect the herd animals for obtaining the services. As the herd size increases, the farmers’ dependence on the service delivery systems also increases for various services leading to positive and significant relationship with farmers’ perception towards them. Positive and significant association of extension contact and social participation with farmers’ perception towards livestock service delivery systems might be because of the fact that when the farmers have more contact with these agents and participate more in various activities in the communuty, their awareness about the various services provided by them also increases. The income of the farmers increases due to the services provided by the livestock services delivery systems.

Hence, annual gross income had positive relationship with the farmers’ perception. The positive relationship of mass media exposure and experience in livestock farming with farmers’ perception might be because of the fact that increased experience and farmers’ exposure towards the mass media increases their awareness level about the services being provided by various livestock services delivery systems.

Conclusion

The study concluded that majority of livestock farmers had favorable perception towards various services of existing livestock service delivery systems. However, the existing livestock service delivery systems were unable to satisfy the respondents in the areas of providing services round the clock, satisfactory subsidies in purchasing of animals, visiting livestock farms consistently,sufficient staff in delivering the services, providing services up to the grass root leveland carrying out follow up actions regularly.Hence, various service providers should improve their activities in these areas to satisfy the farmers.

References

1. Deekshit G.V., Harilal R. and Sharma G.R.K. (2017). Livestock service delivery in Andhra Pradesh-Status and Perspectives. Indian Research Journal of Extension Education, 17 (spl. issue): 1-4.
2. Gautam U.S., Chand R. and Singh D.K. (2007). Socio-Personal Correlation for Decision-making and adoption of dairy practices. Indian Research Journal of Extension Education, 7 (2-3):10-11.
3. Government of India (2006). Planning Commission working papers of eleventh five-year plan 2007-2011, New Delhi.
4. Haldar A. (2008). A comparative study of benefits perceived by farmers selling raw milk and chhana to sweet makers in West Bengal. M.Sc. Thesis, National Dairy Research Institute (Deemed University), Karnal, Haryana.
5. Jagadeeswary V. (2003). Establishing private veterinary clinics in Andhra Pradesh: An opinion study. V.Sc. Thesis, Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad.
6. Jhirwal A., Goswami S., Choudhary V., Singh V and Mishra G. (2018). Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on the Knowledge Level of Poultry Entrepreneurs in Ajmer District of Rajasthan. International Journal of Livestock Research, 8(12): 168-174.
7. Kathiriya J.B., Damasia D.M. and Kabaria B.B. (2013). Role of rural women in dairy farming of Rajkot district. Tamil Nadu Journal of Veterinary and Animal Science, 9 (4): 239-247.
8. Kleeman G. (1999). Responses of the livestock services delivery and its management to the Asian economic crisis. Proceedings of the workshop on the implications of the Asian economic crisis for the livestock industry held in Bangkok on 6–9 July 1999, Organised by FAO, UN.
9. Planning Commission (2007). Report of the working group on Animal Husbandry and Dairying – 11th five-year plan (2007- 12). New Delhi. pp.232.
10. Prabaharan R. (2000). Livestock–Research investment crucial. The Hindu Survey of Indian Agriculture, Chennai, The Hindu, Newspaper.
11. Rajashree (2000). Farmers perception on privatizing animal husbandry extension services. M.V.Sc. Thesis, Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, Chennai.
12. Ravikumar S., Reddy KV.R. and Sudhakar Rao B. (2007). Farmer’s choice for cost recovery of veterinary services in different livestock holding systems: A case study of India. Livestock Research for Rural Development, 19: Article-66.
13. Rewani S.K. and Tochhawng L. (2014). Social empowerment of women self-group members engaged in livestock rearing, Indian Research Journal of Extension Education, 14 (2): 116-119.
14. Tiwari N. and Upadhya R. (2012). Technological need of rural women in selected drudgery reducing technologies related to animal husbandry. Rajasthan Journal of Extension Education, 20: 10-14.