Public-Private Partnerships in the Indian Agricultural Sector: A Potential Path to Transformation

Abstract

Amidst the burgeoning challenges and untapped potential of India's agricultural sector, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) emerge as a promising avenue for sustainable growth and farmer empowerment. This paper delves into the intricacies of PPPs, exploring their multifaceted potential to enhance productivity, bolster farmer incomes, strengthen infrastructure, and promote sustainable agricultural practices. For a number of decades, development interventions in low-income countries have been dominated by the effort to transform and accelerate the role of smallholder farms in agricultural development and food security through linkages between farmers and businesses. This has mostly been done through schemes with one or multiple contracts that have been done separately. The outcomes of a number of studies examining the effects of these schemes on smallholder farms have varied. Agricultural Public Private Partnership (Ag-PPP) is a novel approach to achieving broader and longer-lasting effects. Notwithstanding, restricted observational proof exists on the impacts of Ag-PPP mediations and focusing on a similar rancher. By looking at how an Ag-PPP affects small-scale common bean producers in India, we fill this research gap. In a multi-treatment setting, we estimate these effects by employing a doubly robust difference-in-difference method. According to the findings, the PPP resulted in favorable outcomes for farmers and encouraged increased production through specific interventions. There is evidence to suggest that the PPP and its interventions were linked to significant increases in output marketed, sales volumes, and productivity. Getting packaged intercessions had more noteworthy impacts than a solitary mediation and impacts changed among people bean crop proprietors. According to the findings, a PPP's provision of bundled interventions has the potential to boost productivity and ease restrictions on market access. The results of this Ag-PPP could be changed for different settings i.e., yields and regions, to illuminate food and improvement strategy somewhere else.