An exploration about Attitude of farm women towards Indigenous Agriculture Practices

Farm women are the backbone of Indian culture. Eighty percent of the economically active women are engaged in activities of sowing, transplanting, weeding, manuring, harvesting, threshing and storage etc. In true sense, farm women are the store-house of indigenous knowledge and experience with respect to agriculture, which can form very good base for further development. Women can be extremely useful in identifying local farm resources, an aspect critical for success of agricultural production. They are diligent in showing the ways to develop traditional agricultural practices and strategies appropriate for local situations. There is an urgent need to blend modern scientific knowledge and the indigenous agricultural technologies to draw a line between the popular superstitions from rational indigenous technologies, so the later one deserve to be encouraged through scientific study and research. Higher productivity, cost effectiveness, non- polluting, hazardlessness, easy availability, stability, safety, and sustainability is the basic characteristics of traditional agricultural practices which should be strengthened by scientific explanation and documentation. An effort was made to develop a scale to measure the attitude of farm women towards traditional agricultural practices. For measuring the attitude of farm women towards TAPs, a scale was developed by the investigator in light of the suggestions of the experts. Most of the respondents had favourable attitude towards traditional agricultural practices whereas 6.00 percent of farm women had unfavourable attitude and only 3.33 percent farm women had most favorable attitude towards traditional agricultural practices which indicate that farm women still had still faith in applicability of these generation-old farm practices as these are according to their socio-cultural domain of living, raised by the means of indigenous research. They considered these practices as their part of life, which ultimately reinforces their favourable attitude towards these traditional agricultural practices.