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Background: Efficiency of production system is calculated by the input spent to amount of output produced. The Agronomic efficiency has been found to be below 48% than the world efficiency standard of 40 kg ha-1. The average fertilizer usage of India is 133 kg ha-1, 232% higher than the global standard fertilizer of 40 kg ha-1. The certified seeds and agriculture machinery usage has been increased by 15% and 13% in India but the efficiency of farm stays behind. Methods: With this back ground the present study applied cost approach variable return to scale Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the Indian farms resource using 200 rural farms of Tamil Nadu state. The data envelopment analysis models have the advantage of simultaneous measure of technical, allocative and cost efficiency of the individual farms. Result: The cost efficiency among the respondents ranged from 0 to 1 with a mean efficiency of 0.66. The study found that Decision-Making Units (DMU) have cost inefficiency, suggesting that most of the DMU operated very far away from the efficiency frontier. Allocative inefficiency (0.55) is worse than the technical inefficiency (0.80), implying that the lower economic efficiency is the result of high allocative inefficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the demographic variations in basic science education across the country on the basis of the CSIR-UGC national eligibility test (NET) held during the period 2002-2006. The states, representing different demographic zones, were ranked according to the number of qualifying students and the percentage selected. A simple scatter plot of selection versus enrolment shows that Delhi and West Bengal perform better than the norm, whereas Kerala and Tamil Nadu relatively underperform. The data envelopment analysis technique has been employed to further examine the relative efficiency of basic science education, in terms of the number of students qualifying NET in five subjects, viz. chemical sciences; earth, atmospheric, ocean and planetary sciences; life sciences; mathematical sciences, and physical sciences, across different states of the country. The position of a particular state on the efficiency frontier could serve as a measure of capacity building in these disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]