Growth Performance and Resource Use Efficiency of Maize in Bihar: Economic Perspectives

The present investigation was carried out to estimate growth in area, production and productivity and resource use efficiency of maize in Bihar. During the first period (1970-71 to 2014-15, the compound growth rate (CGR) of area for maize was estimated to be negative (-0.023%), whereas it was observed positive for both production (1.367%) and productivity (1.385%) indicating thereby increase in production growth on account of rise in productivity with the introduction of rabi maize. Technical efficiencies at state level in maize production were found to be 64% for kharif maize and 71% in rabi maize, indicating thereby production changes by 36% and 29% in kharif and rabi maize are possible to increase with the available technology. Allocative mean efficiencies for kharif and rabi maize were calculated 68% and 65%, revealing the fact that farmers could reduce costs by 32% and 35% by using optimum proportions of inputs considering it's prices while selecting it's quantities. Further the values of cost efficiency (CE) was computed as 0.44 and 0.46 for both kharif and rabi maize, respectively. This emphasizes that this provides ample scope to reduce the cost of production by 56% and 54% in both seasons of maize through efficient use of available resources (at least cost) to achieve the objective for optimization of income.