| Abstrakt: |
Fruit marketing is more challenging than other agricultural commodities due to the product’s high perishability, seasonality, and bulkiness, all of which necessitate special attention and early disposal. Market centres are supposed to be the farmer’s initial point for marketing-related tasks. This work aims to identify the location, spatial arrangement, and hierarchical organization of functional fruit market centres in Kashmir Valley, India. Both primary and secondary data sources were used to achieve the objective’s fundamental premises. By handheld Global Positioning System (GPS), the coordinates of selected fruit market centres were collected, and their distributional pattern was evaluated using Nearest Neighbour Analysis. The result indicates that the selected sites follow a “random distributional pattern” with an Rn value of 1.12. The hierarchical classification was evaluated using functional composite indices calculated by the Davies location quotient method and annual turnover. Among the ten functional fruit market centres, only one is in the highest (1st) order of Hierarchy, two in the 2nd, two in the 3rd, and five in the lowest (4th), depicting the region’s asymmetrical hierarchical organization. The study findings could be influential in formulating strategies to enhance the marketing efficiency of fruit market centres in the region. |
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