Accessibility and Usage of ICT Hardwares Among Hill Farm Women

The present study was conducted in view of analyzing the accessibility and use of ICT hardware by 100 farm women from Baijnath Block of Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh. ICT is a diverse set of technological tools and resources to create, store, generate value and manage information. They consist of segments as diverse as telecommunications, radio and television broadcasting, computer hardware, software and services and electronic media. Advancements in the field of electronic and digital technology has helped to great extent in easy transfer of agricultural technologies to the ultimate target groups which are women to great extent in agriculture. These women due to household responsibilities can't step out of their homes and thus have little access to agricultural knowledge and information being disseminated through various training programmes for the benefit of increasing agricultural production. However, for bringing the female agricultural workforce in the mainstream of technology transfer there is a need to shift towards mass media and ICT tools. For this it is thus important to analyze the status of availability, access and use of ICT by farm women. The analysis of the study reveals that mobile phones and television were owned by all the respondents. The access and use of mobile phones were reported to be maximum (85.0%) as against Television (54%) and radios. However, the access to other ICT tools like Kiosks, CD/DVD etc. were reported by few respondents.