Agro Based (Central) Public Sector Enterprises : Select Performance Indicators, Capital and Labour Productivity Analysis

Undeniably, agriculture sector has been backbone of the Indian economy. The role of the government has been crucial ever since the Five Year Plans were launched. Among its various policy interventions the government also set up agro-based public sector enterprises namely National Seeds Corporation Limited (NSCL), State Farms Corporation of India Limited (SFCIL), Andaman and Nicobar Island Forest & Plantation Development Corporation Limited (ANIFPDC) and North Eastern Regional Agricultural Marketing Corporation Limited (NERAMCL) between the periods 1963 to 1982. Select performance indicators understudy include turnover, net profit / loss and net worth of these enterprises. These have not been somewhat satisfactory. Average annual growth rate for sales volume, capital employed, labour and its payment have been calculated by using semi log model for the period 2002-2007. It is observed that these enterprises have been displacing labour and resorting to capital deployment increasingly. Individual enterprises, however, have shown variations in respect of average annual growth rate. For example ANIFPDC shows negative growth i.e. -17.39 percent per annum in its sales volume, while SFCIL recorded negative growth in employee payments during 2002-07.Based on data collected from various issues of Public Enterprises Survey, an attempt has been made in this study to calculate elasticities as well as marginal value of productivity with the help of Cobb Douglas production function for the period 2002-2007. Our study on capital and labour productivity has revealed mixed results. The empirical evidence of the present paper has established the fact that elasticity as well as marginal productivity of labour was highly insignificant in case of public sector agro enterprises. Not only this, marginal productivity of labour was found negative for most of the CPSEs in this study. This shows the existence of surplus labour force in CPSEs, which has compelled the Union Government to introduce the schemes like VRS for CPSEs