A Critical Analysis of Mode of Functioning of Women Collective Farming Groups in Palakkad District of Kerala State

Collective farming aims to bring significant changes among farmwomen through increased agricultural production and productivity. The present study was undertaken to analyse the ‘mode of functioning of different women collective farming groups’ in Palakkad district of Kerala during 2017-2018 by the ex-post-facto research design with a sample size of 90 groups. The result revealed that the majority (67.78%) of the collective women groups were formed by the support of local self- governing bodies. The groups concentrated on location-based farming activities and the reason might be that these groups were operating at the grassroots level obliviously they got full support from the local bodies. Freedom of participation in the group process was expressed by 65.56 per cent of the participants. Three-fourth (75.56%) of respondents expressed that decision-making in groups done with consensus brings strong coherence among the members. Attendance of members in group meetings/activities was expressed by 84.44 per cent of the respondents. Further, the function of record maintenance was expressed by 92.20 per cent of the respondents which helped them to analyse and review the past activities with existing ones. There was 84.44 per cent of benefits sharing among the group members equally and the remaining 15.56 per cent of them were keeping some amount as corpus fund for the group. In nutshell, to strengthen the women collective farming groups, one must facilitate the groups to acquire strong communication process, decision making and mutual trust, transparency in benefit sharing, risk taking etc., which will help the groups to take up agriculture and allied activities in a sustained manner.