Appraisal of attitude of farm women towards traditional agricultural practices for sustainable agriculture

Farm women are the backbone of Indian agriculture. About 80% of the economically active women are engaged in various farm activities, viz. sowing, transplanting, weeding, manuring, harvesting, threshing and storage. They are the store-house of indigenous knowledge and experience with respect to agriculture, which can form very good base for further development. There is an urgent need to blend modern scientific knowledge and the indigenous agricultural technologies to draw a line between the popular superstitions from rational indigenous technologies, so the later one deserves to be encouraged through scientific study and research. Higher productivity, cost effectiveness, non-polluting, hazardlessness, easy availability, stability, safety, and sustainability is the basic characteristics of traditional agricultural practices which should be strengthened by scientific explanation and documentation. For measuring the attitude of farm women towards traditional agricultural practices (TAPs), a scale was developed in light of the suggestions of the experts. Most of the respondents had ‘favourable’ attitude (97.7%) towards TAPs, whereas 6.0% of farm women had ‘unfavourable’ attitude and only 3.3% farm women had ‘most favorable’ attitude towards TAPs.