In India, Agriculture and its allied sectors is the largest source of livelihoods. Around 70% of the rural population derive their livelihood from agricultural activities, where small and marginal farmers constitute around 85% of the total land holdings in India. The major concern here is that the average size of land holding in the country is less than one hectare and it is further shrinking. Biggest drawback of this shrinking land holding is that is prevents scale of production. Farmers alone neither can afford to invest in farm mechanization /technology for enhancing farm productivity, nor directly access the buyers. Hence, they face some challenges both in production and post production stages like access to production technology, quality inputs at reasonable price, credit, seed production, value addition, processing, investment, frequent crop failures, lack of assured market, income safety and poorly developed supply chain etc. Due to this they are highly dependent on the exploitative intermediaries and local money lenders.

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Keywords: FPOs, Agricultural Activities, Supply Chain, Money Lenders, Small and Marginal Farmers.