author(s)
Asit Chakrabarti, BK Jha, PK Sarkar and VK Yadav

abstract
To improve the socio-economic status of the traditional farmer, backyard poultry is a handy enterprise with low-cost initial investment, but high economic return along with guarantee for improving protein deficiency among the poor. A study was conducted to find out the performance of backyard poultry viz. Vanaraja and Kaveri in tribal villages in Jharkhand. In total 117 (76 male and 41 female) tribal backyard poultry farmers were purposively selected for the present study from four villages of Ranchi district. These farmers procured improved variety of egg from institute farm for hatching in traditional method by deshi broody hen during 2015 to 2019. The data were collected for growth, feed intake, egg production, egg weight, egg consumed, egg sold, live bird sold including rearing cost and return on back yard poultry farming. The socioeconomic data reveals that 63.24 % farmers depended on crop and livestock for their livelihood and 24.79 % on a combination of crop, livestock and non-farm sources whereas, a small proportion (11.97 %) depended solely on livestock. The day old body weight of Vanaraja and Kaveri birds were 36.43±1.27 g and 30.32±0.85 g whereas, body weight at 240 days were 1974.35±43.14 g and 1885.12±47.35 g, respectively. The average age of sexual maturity, annual egg production and egg weight at 280 days age was 172.36±2.23 and 190.11±5.25 days, 156.15±15.6 and 144.33±13.14 numbers and 55.85±5.53 and 50.21±3.54 g for Vanaraja and Kaveri, respectively. The comparative benefit-cost (B:C) ratio (gross return/ gross cost) was 2.02 and 1.89 for Vanaraja and Kaveri birds, respectively. The economics of rearing Vanaraja and Kaveri poultry birds at farmer’s house was found to be beneficial for income generation and can contribute to rural livelihoods.