Role of goats in livelihood of rural poor in Uttarakhand hills: An analysis with special reference to multivariate typology of households based on farm and socio-economic characteristics

Abstract

The present study was conducted on a sample of 100 goat farmers randomly drawn from 2 administrative blocks in Almora, Uttarakhand to analyze the role of goats in the livelihoods of rural households. Farm household typologies were constructed by using 2 multivariate statistical techniques, viz. principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA). PCA was used to transform linearly an original set of 17 variables, representing farm and socioeconomic characteristics, into a smaller set of uncorrelated variables (factors) that represents most of the information in the original set. The factors retained from the PCA were used for cluster analysis. Five homogenous groups (clusters) were obtained. Cluster 1 (20%) was identified as households with high farm family labour involvement and low female labour involvement in goat husbandry, Cluster 2 (21%) as households with high income from agriculture and dairying, Cluster 3 (18%) as households with low income from agriculture and dairying, Cluster 4 (22%) as households with high farm family labour involvement and high female labour involvement in goat husbandry and Cluster 5 (19%) as female headed households. Contribution of income from goat in animal husbandry income, farm income and household's total income for all clusters combined was 61.45, 14.23 and 7.01%, respectively. Share of income from goat was highest for cluster 3, implying that small ruminants like goats are most important for livelihood security of resource poor farmers. Hence, any improvement in goat production enhances the socio-economic status of the farmers, specially the rural poor.