Effectiveness of Climate Resilient Technologies in Building Resilience of Farmers: Development of Resilience Index and Measurement of Resilience

Climate change and its impacts are pushing the agriculture sector to a new normal. The sustenance of a system thus requires updating of technologies and practices consistently. Resilience at individual level and society level has an important say in satisfying these requirements. The technologies offering resilience to the changing contexts of agriculture became an imperative to keep the sector and its dependents secured. The need is to measure resilience of farmers after implementation of the technologies. A composite index measuring resilience is developed after rigorous procedures to meet this objective, with four major domains-self confidence, problem solving skills, preparedness for contingency and optimism-and 18 items under these domains. The comparison of two groups of farmers (NICRA beneficiaries and non-Beneficiaries) from rainfed agro-ecosystem based on the index score revealed that NICRA beneficiaries have high score (.52) on index which is 2.7 times higher than non-NICRA beneficiaries score (.14). A significant difference on most of the items between the two groups was obtained with high mean rank for NICRA farmers. The data was tested using independent t-test with unequal sample size and Kruskal-Wallis one way ANOVA. The index can be used to measure resilience in similar agro-ecological area. The high resilience of NICRA farmers indicates the effectiveness of climate resilient technologies in building resilience.