Determinants Influencing the Continuance and Discontinuance of Beneficiaries of Priceless Distribution of Goat Scheme in Tamil Nadu

Priceless distribution of the Goat scheme performances of beneficiaries in continuance and discontinuance of the scheme is explored and assessed by the linear discriminant function analysis. This analysis was adopted to identify the variables that are imperative in discriminating between continuance and discontinuance of rearing goats among the beneficiaries of the priceless goat scheme. This analysis is executed by including 21 independent variables such as age, caste, education, family size, primary occupation, secondary occupation, goat income, total income, flock size, time spent on goat rearing, experience, material possession, social participation, contact with extension agency, information seeking behavior, decision making behavior, economic motivation, risk orientation, self-reliance, scientific orientation and knowledge and dependent variables - continuance and discontinuance. The results of the step-wise selection revealed the flock size, time spent on goat rearing, experience, social participation, self- reliance and these were the important significantly discriminating the continuance and discontinuance of rearing goats by the beneficiaries of the Priceless goat scheme. . The results of the classification of cases based on the score obtained by the discriminant function had shown that among discontinuance 95.8 % were predicted correctly by the model, while among the continuance 100 % were identified correctly. In total 99.5 per cent of the original grouped cases were correctly classified by the model.