Relationship between Affordability to pay for the Veterinary Services and profile characteristics of Dairy farmers

An Ex-post facto research design was adopted to study the affordability of dairy farmers to pay for the veterinary services and their relationship with personal and selected psychological characteristics. Majority of the dairy farmers possessed medium affordability followed by less affordability to pay for the veterinary services. Correlation analysis indicated that all the variables except age have got positive and significant correlation with the affordability to pay for the veterinary services. The variable age was negative and significantly correlated with affordability to pay for the veterinary services. Regression analysis indicated that all the variables selected for study put together contributed for explaining 74.5% of variation in the dependent variable i.e affordability to pay for the services. The profile characteristics of dairy farmers like education, information seeking behaviour, scientific orientation, economic orientation and market orientation had significantly positive influence on their affordability to pay for the veterinary services; while age and management orientation had significant negative impact on the same. The contribution of the remaining 5 variables were not significant.


Introduction
conduct the present study in 3 mandals comprising 9 villages of Mahaboobnagar districts of Andhra In India, the veterinary services have been Pradesh.A total of 90 farmers were selected based on funded, managed and delivered by the public sector.stratified random sampling method.A structured But in recent past the government's financial resources interview schedule was developed and used for the for the provision of veterinary services have not kept study.Sufficient rapport was established with the pace with the increased livestock population (Carney, respondents before collection of the data.Responses 1998) and production resulting in detoriation of of the respondents were collected personally and quality services by the public sector agencies appropriate statistical tests like frequencies and (Anteneh, 1984;dehaan and Nissen, 1980).Hence percentages were used for arriving meaningful privatisation of veterinary services is considered as conclusions.one strategy that could be implemented to improve the

Results and Discussion
quality of the services and to decrease the financial and administrative burden on scarce public resources.
The affordability to pay for the veterinary Therefore, the time has come to make transitional shift services by the dairy farmers was ascertained and the to private sector for support, though not for total results were presented in Table 1.From the table 1, it substitution.Intermediate steps do exist between a could be inferred that, majority of the dairy farmers solely public veterinary service system along with (60.00%) had medium affordability to pay for the private partnership.veterinary services.About 23 percent of the dairy Keeping the above facts in view, the present farmers had low affordability, while 16.67 percent had study has been designed to know the relationship high affordability for the veterinary services.It could between affordability to pay for the veterinary services be inferred that, farmers were affordable to pay for the and profile and selected psychological characteristics profitable and result oriented veterinary services because of the reason that they rear the animals for of dairy farmers in Andhra Pradesh.their livelihood security.Hence there is a need to variation in the dependent variable and the results Further the data was subjected to correlation were presented in the Table 3. analysis to understand the nature of relationship From the table 3, it could be inferred that the between the profile characteristics viz., age, overall regression coefficient or coefficient of 2 education, socio-economic status, innovativeness, determination (R ) is 0.745 i.e., 74.5 per cent of the achievement motivation, decision making ability, variation is contributed by all the independent variables and the remaining 25.5 per cent of the variation is due information seeking behaviour, deferred gratification, rationality, scientific orientation, economic to the external factors or the factors which are not controlled in the research design like climatic factors, orientation, value orientation, marketing orientation prevailing disease incidence rates etc.Among the and management orientation and the scores of independent variables in the relationship, education, dependent variable affordability to pay for the information seeking behaviour, scientific orientation, veterinary services and is presented in Table 2.
economic orientation and market orientation had Out of the 14 independent variables except the significantly positive influence on the dependent variable; age, all the variables showed positive and significant while age and management orientation had significantly correlation with the affordability to pay for the negative impact on the dependent variable.The veterinary services at 1 percent level of significance.contribution of the remaining 5 variables was not Age was having negative correlation with the significant.affordability to pay for the services at 1 per cent level.
The analysis clearly indicates that the farmers The findings were in accordance with the results of with high and medium profile characteristics had shown Ahuja et al. (2000) and Woodford J D (2003).
high and medium affordability to pay for the services.

Regression analysis between the affordability to
Relationship between Affordability to pay for the Veterinary Services and profile characteristics of Dairy farmers