Spatial Structure and Restructuring of Agricultural Support Infrastructure in a Semi-Arid Agrarian District: A Block-Level Statistical Analysis of Hamirpur, Bundelkhand (Uttar Pradesh)

Agricultural support infrastructure input retailing, storage, marketing and institutional service mediates the translation of agrarian potential into realised farm output, yet its internal spatial organisation is rarely subjected to formal statistical scrutiny at the sub-district scale. This paper analyses ten facility indicators for the seven development blocks of Hamirpur district, Bundelkhand, for 2024–25, together with a three-year district time series (2022–23 to 2024–25). Descriptive dispersion measures, chi-square tests of spatial uniformity, Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves, a Pearson correlation matrix, principal component analysis, a composite z-score index (CAII) and Ward's hierarchical clustering are applied. Three findings stand out. First, the district has undergone a rapid ownership transition: private and non-departmental outlets now supply 88.0% of seed, 89.9% of fertiliser and 97.6% of pesticide retailing, while cooperative seed centres halved (47→23) and warehouse numbers fell by 75.9%. Second, facility distribution across blocks is significantly non-uniform for six of eight count indicators (p<0.05), with inequality greatest for institutional rather than commercial facilities (Gini = 0.360 for FPOs against 0.080 for warehouses). Third, PCA isolates two orthogonal dimensions — a commercial input-retailing axis (34.4% of variance) and an institutional–storage axis (29.5%) — that are essentially uncorrelated, implying that market-led and state-led provisioning follow independent geographies. The CAII identifies Rath as the sole high-infrastructure block (100.0) and Gohand, Muskara and Kurara as a contiguous deficit cluster (0.0–6.1). Urban areas, holding only 0.8% of the district's food-grain area, concentrate 38.3% of fertiliser outlets a disparity ratio of roughly 48. The paper argues that aggregate district-level growth in facility counts has concealed, and may have intensified, intra-district polarisation.