Study of Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPS) in Meghalaya State of India: Methods for Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) income plays an important role in the household economy in the rural forest dwelling communities. The study utilised both the primary data and secondary data. Primary data were collected from 30 sample households from two villages in Ri-Bhoi district of Meghalaya to analysis the significant of NTFPs income in the rural household economy with the objectives, (i) To study the determinants of income generation through NTFP (ii) To estimate the extent of employment generation through NTFP (iii) Price behaviour of selected NTFP in Mawiong regulated market. Econometric model and Box-Jenkins Autoregressive moving average (ARIMA) methodology were applied for the study. The study found that income from business was the major income sources (45.74 % share to the total household income). Income from NTFPs collection has the second largest share with 22.05 per cent followed by crop production with 14.61 per cent, labour with 9.16 per cent and livestock with 8.44 per cent. The lin-log model was selected as best model based on the value of R2 value (0.89). Years of experience, total hours spent in NTFPs collection and average land holding have positive and significant relationship with the NTFPs income while age and distance travelled has a negative and significant association with it. Broom grass and Tezpatta contribute 2 and 1 manday/qtl/year to the total NTFPs employment. ARIMA (0, 1, 1) was the best fitted model as it has the lowest Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). The price of Broom grass was forecasted for five weeks from 4th week of November to 4th week of December 2018 using ARIMA (0, 1, 1). The forecast Broom grass price for 4th week of November to be ` 2891.66/qtl which will decrease to ` 2687.46 in 4th week of December.