Are farmers willing to pay for quality improvements in livestock services delivery? Evidence from South India?*

Abstract

A study was undertaken in southern peninsular State of India, the Tamil Nadu State, to assess the farmers’ ‘willingness to pay’ (WTP) for improving the quality of livestock services delivery, in terms of geographical proximity, waiting time, drug availability and attitude of staff. The districts of the state were categorized as ‘livestock developed’ (LD) and ‘livestock under developed’ (LUD) based on initial base line developed. Contingent valuation (CV) approach and Tobit regressions were used to as sess (i) the variations in the stated willingness to Pay (WTP) values, and (ii) variations in the probability of stating a positive WTP values for respondents who declared that they were not willing to pay. Overall, the respondents in the study area were willing to pay `8.12 for improving the geographical proximity attribute of the public veterinary centre, while they were ready to pay `8.12 for minimising waiting time in public veterinary centres. To benefit from a better attitude exhibited by the staff of public veterinary centres, the farmers were willing to pay `5.20 and were willing to pay an average of `6.58 as extra user fee on every visit so as to get all the medicines and breeding facilities in the public veterinary centre at all times. An absolute concordance on the levels of attributes and the variations in the stated positive WTP values for quality improvements was noticed. Tobit regression analyses on the improvements of all above attributes indicated that the farmers who were at disadvantaged levels of each attribute were willing to pay more compared to those at an advantaged levels.