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Distress Proneness of Farmers in Agriculturally Developed Cauvery Delta Zone of India

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Abstract

This study strives to explore the distress proneness of farmers in the agriculturally developed Cauvery Delta Zone of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry States by developing a Distress Proneness Index. Based on the severity of causing distress, 240 farmers across Cuddalore, Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam, Thiruvarur and Karaikal districts ranked 15 factors under four dimensions of distress on a Likert Scale of 0–3. It was found that farmers are highly distressed by yield and weather uncertainties, lack of irrigation infrastructure, and high input cost; moderately distressed by shortage and high wages of labour, increasing financial dependency on others, spurious seeds, lack of technical guidance, supplier-induced demand in market, and existing output market avenues; and least distressed by lack of non-farm employment opportunities, credit procedures in public sector banks, being indebted, low commodity price, and frequent electrical load shedding. Dimension-wise, Cauvery Delta farmers are highly prone to production distress with a DPI of 0.70, moderately prone to market and psychological distress with a DPI of 0.44 and 0.34, respectively, and least prone to institutional distress with a DPI of 0.30. Overall, they are moderately prone to agrarian distress with an ADPI of 0.45. Such occupational stress causes various physiological disorders in farmers. A similar exercise for the other 6 agro-climatic zones which possess varied strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help devise region-specific strategies to alleviate the agrarian distress of farmers in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

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Acknowledgements

This study is a part of the project entitled “Socio-economic analysis of agrarian crisis in the coastal belt of Cauvery Delta in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry” sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Ministry of Education, New Delhi, India (Grant No.P1616). The authors are thankful to the funding agency. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their keen interest in enriching the manuscript. The authors thank Dr. Subash SP, Scientist, ICAR-NIAEP, New Delhi for his guidance in attending to the Reviewers’ comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru College of Agriculture and Research Institute, Karaikal, Puducherry, India

    A. Pouchepparadjou, M. Umamageswari, S. Parthasarathi & D. Cathrine

  2. ICAR-Central Institute for Cotton Research, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India

    R. Jayakumara Varadan

Contributions

AP conceptualized and overseen the overall execution of the study, DC collected the data and compiled it, MU and RJV analysed the data, SP and RJV prepared the manuscript. All authors contributed, read and approved the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to R. Jayakumara Varadan.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Handling Editor: Anjani Kumar.

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Cite this article

Pouchepparadjou, A., Umamageswari, M., Varadan, R.J. et al. Distress Proneness of Farmers in Agriculturally Developed Cauvery Delta Zone of India. Agric Res (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40003-025-00864-5

  • Received
  • Accepted
  • Published
  • DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s40003-025-00864-5

Keywords

  • Agrarian distress
  • Distress proneness index
  • Occupational stress
  • Cauvery delta zone
  • Likert scale
  • Beta regression

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