Protected cultivation requires high initial investment and intensive use of inputs for crop production but offers better yield which in turn increases the profitability of the farm. The study attempts to explore the economics of protected cultivation with different interest rates regime and subsidy in Pune and Nasik districts of Maharashtra conducted during 2018-19. About 95 to 97 per cent of the farmers availed subsidy from the government and the rest of the farmers constructed their polyhouse and shade net house without subsidy. About 47 to 50 per cent of the total cost was given as subsidy. Heckman selection model showed that the factors such as years of education, farm size, farm income, membership and occupation were the major determinants of access to credit. The study also indicated that household age, farm size, farm income, distance from the market and access to subsidies were important drivers of technology adoption. Among all, the access to subsidy reflected the availability of external capital support as one of the determining factors for adoption of technology. The factors responsible for non-repayment of loans were increase in farm income, family size and years of schooling.

Analysis of women’s empowerment in cassava was done among farm women and farmers who are involved in cassava cultivation in Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu. Snowball sampling technique was employed for collecting data using semi-structured interview schedule from 50 women and 50 men farmers involved in cassava cultivation. The women empowerment index in cassava was used for estimating the domains of empowerment and gender parity index. Results revealed that cassava women farmers were more empowered than their household male counterparts in the domains of community leadership and time allocation. Whereas, male farmers were more empowered than their female counterparts in production decision making, access to productive resources and control over use of income. It was found that the overall women empowerment score was 0.83 with 28 per cent of women in disempowered category.

Due to the semi-perishable nature of sweet potato the price fluctuation occur based on demand and supply. Hence, it becomes necessary to precisely forecast market price of sweet potato. Price forecasting of sweet potato was carried out for six selected states in India using time series monthly market price, collected from AGMARKNET price portal from January 2010 to December 2021. Exponential Smoothing Models (ESM), Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model and Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) model were used for forecasting of sweet potato price. It was observed that among the forecasting models, the TDNN model predicted accurate future prices of sweet potato based on the lowest Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) than SARIMA and ESM. The forecast indicated that the average market price of sweet potato in selected states of India viz., Kerala, Odisha, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Telangana, would be in the range of Rs. 684 to Rs. 2757 per quintal during January 2022 to December 2022. The forecasted price of sweet potato would provide valuable information to the sweet potato growers, government institutions and other stakeholders in the sweet potato value chain to take appropriate decisions on production, marketing and consumption of sweet potato.