Traditional knowledge in plants, agriculture/related activities and ITS management/practices by female farmers of Sikkim

The researcher is a research scholar and the topic of the researcher is “Role of female labour in farming sector: a study of state of Sikkim” in North- Eastern India. The contribution of women in this noble sector is although enormous yet invisible and does not get counted for much. Nowadays, with voluminous amount of public expenditure on women empowerment schemes, we cannot ignore this issue thus making it unavoidable to empower them also with the intention to fully utilize their caliber in this field. Hence, while collecting data the researcher also tried to extract some knowledge the sample female farmers are possessing related to plants, its usage and the management/practices of different agriculture/animal & the related activities. The present study has analyzed the female farmer's knowledge about the above mentioned area in the region by collecting data from 230 female farmers through interviews using a pre-designed schedule from 24 circles from all the four districts of Sikkim State. Based on their subjective judgments, female farmer's knowledge has been measured and analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Some descriptive statistics, such as percentage as well as one sample t-test of inferential statistics is used to interpret the data. The findings of the study revealed thatfemale farmers do contain some knowledge.The information was further verified by crosschecking and validated by the common response from the other village farmers (people) on same species treatment. The same has been discussed here. Also some suggestions have been given at the end of the paper to document this type of knowledge.