A Methodological Pathway to Quantify Sustainability of Organic Paddy Farming in Andhra Pradesh: OECD Approach to Frame an Index

Agriculture is a key sector of Indias’ economic development and its sustainable development is related to Indias’ healthy development. Rice is the agricultural commodity with the third-highest worldwide production and the most widely consumed staple food. Present day paddy cultivation is mostly dependent on chemicals from sowing to storage like fertilizers, pesticides and weedicides. Farmers are spraying pesticides even 15 days before harvest which led to presence of more chemical residue content in our food. After covid 19 consumers became more health conscious and is preferring organic paddy. So, demand for organic paddy got increased which made farmers to cultivate organic paddy. But there is need to know the sustainability of organic paddy farming for which there is a need of measuring index. So, the objective of the present study was to construct an index to measure the sustainability of organic paddy farming in Andhra Pradesh as researcher hails from it. The study was conducted in 2023 by adopting ex-post facto research design. A sample of 60 certified organic paddy farmers of Chittoor was selected from PGS India website which is non sample area to construct index. A comprehensive 5-dimensional organic paddy Farming Sustainability index (OPFSI) was crafted with 25 indicators, by obtaining data from 30 organic farmers in the Chittoor area for factor analysis. Ecological indicators got maximum weightage of 0.286 followed by economic indicators, bottleneck indicators, agronomic indicators, and market indicators. The validity of the index was 0.89. Reliability of scale was 0.730. The suggested index can be used worldwide with locationspecific modifications.