Analysing adoption of soil conservation measures by farmers in Darjeeling district, India

The study assess the key determinants of the decision to adopt soil conservation in Teesta River Watershed, in Darjeeling District in the Eastern Himalayas. In this watershed, there have been soil conservation both by the individual farmers on their own farm and by the government at the sub-watershed level. We collected data through a primary survey conducted during 2013. This study explicitly accounts for possible neighbourhood effects in influencing adoption. This is captured both by identifying adoption practices among farmers who are immediately upstream, and using spatial econometrics that incorporate the spatial distance between neighboring farms. We use Bayesian formulation of a standard probit model in conjunction with Markov Chain Monte Carlo to estimate the model. The findings suggest positive evidence of neighbourhood impact on farmers in adoption decisions. We also examine if adoption decisions differ between farmers residing in treated and untreated sub-watershed and conclude that they do not. Acknowledgement : I thank the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) for supporting the study financially. This study is part of my PhD dissertation at Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics. I extend my warm gratitude to J V Meenakshi and M N Murty for their supervision, suggestions and encouragements throughout the study. Thanks are also due to K L Krishna, Sanjeev Sharma, Raushan Kumar, Aditi Singhal, Divya Gupta, Bipasha Choudhury, Koushik Singha, Tamash Ranjan Majumdar and Sameer Lam