2024, Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part G

The study's revealed that most of the respondents belong to the middle-age (48%) and around 42 percent of respondents were graduated. Majority of the respondents were male (> 88%) and living in nuclear families (71%). Almost half of the wood log entrepreneurs are landless, so they practice wood logging as their main occupation with sole proprietorship (82%). Cost-returns analysis elucidates that the total cost for wood processing was accounted for Rs. 9.6 crores, out of which 92 percent accounts for variable cost and the remaining accounts for fixed cost. Around Rs. 15 crores are generated as revenue from the main product and by-products, including saw powder (Rs.1.9 lakhs) and fire wood (Rs. 4.1 lakhs) with the returns per rupee of investment of 1.66.

Among the value addition, sofa sets have the highest value-added product (ratio 0.62) followed by dining tables (0.55), doors (0.52), office tables (0.49) and windows (0.45). The study also identified several constraints faced by wood log entrepreneurs such as labour shortages, income tax obligations, Government policies of raw material procurement, high transportation costs and scarcity of raw material.