Impact of newspapers on farmers’ knowledge and adoption of agricultural technologies

Newspapers play an important role in the development of agriculture. Newspapers also disseminate information and technical know-how about agriculture among rural readers. Newspapers are now easily accessible in rural areas and farmers are inclined to look into the newspapers for searching news items, story, issues related to their farming aspects and problems. Newspaper is a good medium of communication in times of crises and urgent situations. Keeping in view the importance of daily newspapers in transfer of technology, National Research Centre on Rapeseed-Mustard (NRCRM), Bharatpur, decided to get news items published in daily newspapers and this study was conducted to assess the impact of newspapers in terms of increase in respondent's knowledge and adoption of mustard technologies and to know the opinion of the respondents regarding different aspects of news articles published in different newspapers. For the purpose of the study, 120 farmers from different villages of Bharatpur district of Rajasthan, who were the regular readers of at least one newspaper, were interviewed randomly who visited the institute during crop season. The study found that majority of the respondents (about 65 per cent) got information or reinforced the knowledge about fertilizer management and seed treatment. It was also observed that 55 per cent respondents adopted different components of fertilizer management practices after reading newspapers. Maximum number of respondents had positive opinion about information utility of articles published. The majority of the respondents considered the information as fully need based, timely, fully practicable, very much trustworthy and very useful for them. The opinion regarding comprehension of information published in news articles, majority of the respondents considered as medium length of articles, interesting method of content presentation, easy to understand the content, appealing news heading, frequently used photographs and satisfactory coverage. The respondents were using the newspapers as one of the important sources of agricultural information.