Farm Women Knowledge Groups (FWKGs) for Enhanced Use of ICT in Agriculture and Allied Sectors

The use of ICT application can enhance opportunities of the remote farmers to live in close proximity of the scientific input. The fusion of computing and communications, especially through the internet has reduced the world into global village creating new actors and new environments. Extension is now becoming more diversified, technology intensive, knowledge oriented and more demand driven. Keeping in view the study was carried out through multistage random sampling along with purposive sampling technique. The result reveals that the situational analysis on knowledge and use of ICT in agriculture and allied sectors from each block, 1-10 villages were selected, FWKGs were organised for enhancing use of selected ICT application, 6 to 10 groups were formed from 1 to 10 villages as per the contacts of individual centres. The numbers of group members at initial stage of formation were 60-157 in the states. Data reveals that 36-92 per cent of the members belonged to 18-35 years of age group, 7-22 per cent were illiterate, Majorities (78-100%) were married and belonged to medium and small family size and were from nuclear families. Majority had farming as their occupation and had small and marginal land holding. More than 50 per cent members had general membership of organisations. The result reveals to enhance the use of ICT tool for agriculture and allied activities interventions programmes for the group members was organised, pre and post scores of knowledge, it was found that there was significant increase in knowledge of respondents of all centres, The knowledge and use of selected ICT tool was also increased significantly in all the centres after intervention, correlation coefficient analysis reveals that there was significant and positive correlation between knowledge and use in 6 centres.