8456 Advances in Life Sciences 5(19), 2016 Analysis of Technical, Economic, Allocative and Scale Efficiencies and Determination of Technical Efficiency of Cassava Production in Kalvarayan and Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu S. ARIVARASAN*, M. CHINNADURAI AND K. R. ASHOK Department of Agricultural Economics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore *email: arasan101@gmail.com Advances in Life Sciences 5(19), Print : ISSN 2278-3849, 8456-8461, 2016 ABSTRACT The study aimed to analyze the technical, economic, allocative and scale efficiencies and determination of technical efficiency of cassava production in the Kalavarayan and Kolli hills in Tamil Nadu. The multi-stage random sampling procedure was adopted to choose 180 sample farmers. The results of the Data Envelopment Analysis revealed that the mean overall technical efficiency of Kalvarayan and Kolli hills farms were 0.78 and 0.92, respectively. Around 90 per cent of the cassava farms in Kalvarayan and Kolli hills were found to be with the scale efficiency of equal to one.The economic efficiency was 0.83 in kalvarayan hills and 0.88 in Kolli hills, indicating that if the farmers operate at the optimal efficiency level, they can reduce the production cost by 17 and 12%, respectively, while producing the same level of output.Education was found as the most influential factor in achieving the cent per cent technical efficiency level in both the hills.Besides, it is worth noting that increased year of framing experience and farm size may increase the technical efficiency of the Kolli hills farmers. Key words Technical efficiency, Scale efficiencies, Data Envelopment Analysis Cassava (Manihotesculenta) is a perennial vegetable crop and belongs to family Euphorbiaceae and originated in the regions of west-central Brazil. Most of the world’s cassava is grown in poor, especially acid soils. Use of modern inputs is generally at low level, without the use of irrigation,fertilizers,fungicides or insecticides and cultural practices are traditional ones.Nevertheless,average yields are reasonable when compared with other crops grown in unirrigated conditions.According to FAO classification, Root and tuber crops form staple diet for three per cent of the global population. India acquires significant position in the global cassava scenario due to its highest productivity in the world (35.64 tonnes per ha). It is cultivated in 0.22 million hectares producing 8.13 million tonnes in the year 2013-14. It is largely cultivated in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, parts of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Puducherry and Assam. It is a food security crop in Kerala. Tamil Nadu occupies first position in terms of area and production of cassava in India and its productivity is the highest in the world. It is cultivated both under irrigated and rainfed conditions. Sixty per cent of the crop is grown under irrigated conditions in Salem, Erode, Dharmapuri and Namakkal districts while forty per cent of the crop is cultivated as rainfed crop in these districts. However in Kanyakumari district cassava is mostly cultivated under rainfed conditions and it accounts for nearly 12 per cent of area. Technical efficiency is an indicator of the productivity of the firm and the variation in technical efficiency can reflect the productivity difference across firms. It helps for hunting the potentiality of the existing technology. Therefore, improvement in technical efficiency is the key for meeting the cassava production demand in the years to come. The present study has assessed the technical Economic,allocative and scale efficiency in cassava production along with the influence of various socio-economic factors on this efficiency of the cassava farms in Kalvarayan and kolli hills. MATERIALS AND METHODS The present study aimed to analyze the economics of cassava production system in Western Tamil Nadu. Multi stage random sampling technique was adopted to select the sample respondents. In the first stage, Salem and Namakkal district were purposively selected since these are the major cassava growing districts of western Tamil Nadu.Kollimalai block in namakkal district and Peththanaikenpalayam block (kalrayan hills) in salemare the highest contributors to area under cassava cultivation.These two districts constituted 41 per cent of the area under cassava cultivation in the state. Besides, a large number of cassava processing units also functioning in these two districts. In the second stage, Pethanaikenpalayam block from Salem district and Kollimalai from Namakkal district were purposively selected based on the highest area under cassava in hills area. In these blocks, cassava is being cultivated predominantly under rainfed condition. In the next stage, three villages were selected from the selected each block randomly. A list of cassava cultivators was obtained from Village Administrator Officer.From the list, by using random number table, 30 farmers were selected at random from each villages. Thus the total sample size constitutes 180 sample farmers. Tools of analysis In present study, Data Envelopment Analysis model was used to estimate the technical, scale and return to scale. DEA uses linear programming to construct the efficient frontier with the best performing observations of the sample used, so that the frontier envelops all observations (Charneset.al., 1978). The distance from a farm to the frontier provides a measure of its efficiency. DEA also enables to assess under which returns to scale each farm operates and to calculate their scale inefficiency. Calculating efficiency under the assumption of constant returns to scale (CRS) gives the ‘overall technical efficiency’ score, while