International Journal of Agriculture Extension and Social Development

author(s)
Nilay Adhikari, Ram Singh, Th. Onchoila Maring and Harigovind P

abstract
The dairy industry is increasingly emerging as one of the most widespread and profitable industries due to its huge potential in fulfilling the nutritional demand worldwide. India holds first rank in terms of milk production in the entire world and Assam is the highest milk producing state in the North-Eastern Region (NER) of India with about 60 percent share of the total milk production in this region. The state registered a growth rate of about 2.97 percent in volume of milk production (GoI, 2019). Despite of registering a positive growth rate in terms of milk production, per capita availability of milk in Assam was estimated as only 73 grams per day in 2019, which is far below the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recommended intake of 300 grams per day. Under this backdrop, the present study was taken up with the twin objectives to study the trend and growth rate of milk production in Assam and to forecast the production of milk through ARIMA modeling. The study is based on time series data covering the period of 1995-96 to 2020-21. The growth rate of milk production in Assam was examined by estimating compound annual growth rate and among the parametric trend models linear trend model is found to adequately delineate trends in production of milk. Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) was applied for modeling and forecasting of milk production of Assam. Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test was used to determine the stationarity of the model after which forecasting for future production was done. Data shows that production of milk displayed increasing trend and positive growth rate (1.27 percent per annum) and the production data showed low instability over the years. Moreover, the forecast from the fitted ARIMA model (2,1,0) shows that the milk production is expected to be 1024.04 million litres by 2026. Based on the findings, it is recommended to augment milk production with proper marketing and transport facilities in Assam to counter the consequences of low per capita availability of milk in the state and also promoting formation of dairy co-operative societies to restrict the milk flow through unorganized sector and regulate it through the organized sector to generate higher remuneration for the dairy farmers.