  In our country, majority of agricultural workers (who may include farmers
working within a cooperative framework, or those who work individually either
as owners or tenants) are shown to be reaping the least amount of profits in
the agriculture value chain when compared to the effort they put in. There is a
good amount of literature which broadly substantiates this situation in our
country. Main objective of this study is to have a broad understanding of the
role played by public systems in this value chain, particularly in the segment
that interacts with farmers. As a starting point, we first try to get a better
understanding of how farmers are placed in a typical agriculture value chain.
For this we take the help of recent seminal works on this topic that captured
the situation of farmers' within certain types of value chains. Then, we
isolate the segment which interacts with farmers and deep-dive into data to
understand the role played by public interventions in determining farmers'
income from agriculture. NSSO 70th round on Situation Assessment Survey of
farmers has data pertaining to the choices of farmers and the type of their
interaction with different players in the value chain. Using this data we tried
to get a econometric picture of the role played by government interventions and
the extent to which they determine the incomes that a typical farming household
derives out of agriculture.
