Socio-economic Assessment of Farm women in Rice Cultivation

Rice is one of the world's main staple crops with nearly 2.5 billion people consuming it has their main staple food. Rice farming is also a major source of employment, especially, for the poor and about four-fifth of the world's rice production is grown by small farmers with low income in developing countries. The rural women play a pivotal role in agriculture in India. Besides sharing abundant responsibility in maintaining the household, they attend to various farm operations, leveling, sowing, transplanting, weeding, watering, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, storage, feeding of cattle, fodder collection, milking etc. They constitute about 55 per cent of the total agriculture labour and 60 per cent of the labour engaged in livestock. The role of external factors affecting knowledge, participation and adoption behavior of the farm women, a study was conducted in three districts of Karnataka state viz., Dharwad, Uttar Kannada and Haveri to assess the extent of knowledge, participation and adoption level of farm women in rice cultivation practices. Twenty five practices of rice cultivation were subdivided into five major aspects of rice cultivation viz., Pre-production, Production, Plant protection, Post harvesting and marketing. Structured interview schedule was used to collect the data. Overall knowledge index of the respondents regarding rice cultivation was 75.70, participation index was 85.81 and adoption index was 74.97. This clearly indicates that women had high knowledge and also participated actively in all the activities. The size of the family was found to be positively correlated with women knowledge and participation whereas landholding and size of the family were positively correlated with women adoption of rice cultivation practices.