Identification of areas of intervention needs for enhancing ginger production in some selected areas of Darjeeling district, West Bengal

The study was conducted during the year 2013 with a specific objective, i.e., to study the selected agro-economic, socio-psychological and communicational variables for identifying the areas requiring intervention needs for enhancing ginger production within the study area. 100 ginger growers who have been randomly selected from five gram panchayats of Pulbazar-Bijanbari block of Dist. Darjeeling, West Bengal. In the investigation ‘intervention needs’ was the dependable variable(Y) and 12 variables (X1……X12) grouped under three categories, viz., agro-economic (X1-X3), socio-psychological (X4-X10) and communicational (X11-X12) were the independent variables. The total number of respondents was classified into marginal and small farmers and statistical tool used for analysis of facts was Person’s correlation coefficient. The study revealed that an intervention need with respect to market orientation was positively and significantly correlated. For marginal farmers, the variables recorded positive relations with intervention needs (may not be significant at 1 % and 5 % level) are farm size, cropping intensity, family size, family type and economic motivation. The small farmers showed a negative co-relation regarding intervention needs in case of family size and family type. Both marginal and small farmers have recorded negative co-relation with intervention needs on the following areas, i.e., education, utilization of mass media. Economic motivation has shown significant correlation for intervention needs to be undertaken by field level agricultural specialist and policy makers to ensure better livelihood of the farmers through the production of ginger or other crops.