Vermiculture Technology in Tribal Social System (Innovation - Decision Behaviour Among Women)

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Review of literature. 3. Methodology. 4. Results and discussion. Summary and conclusion. Recommendation. Bibliography. Appendix.

"Dominance of chemical agriculture in last few decades has deteriorated the soil health and created the problem of agricultural waste disposal in rural areas. It is important to maintain environmental and agricultural sustainability without reducing productivity. Vermiculture technology has been considered as a sound and viable option to regenerate the soil health through recycling the agricultural waste. Vermiculture is the process of using earthworms to convert vegetable and animal waste into valuable product, namely vermicompost.

Agriculture progresses technologically as farmers adopt innovations. It is a common phenomenon that farmers, like any other individual, do not adopt innovations simultaneously as they appear in the social-system. Diffusion typically takes a number of years, seldom reaches a level of 100% of the potential adopter population, and mostly follows some sort of S-shaped curve in time.

The objectives of this investigation were to study the innovation decision behaviour of tribal women, knowledge, attributes, attitude, adoption, constraints faced in adoption of Vermiculture technology and ways adopted to overcome them and the association of personal, socio-economic and communication variables with innovation decision behaviors of tribal women.

The study was conducted in purposively selected village "Goran" of Panchayat Samiti Jhadol of Udaipur District. A sample of 246 tribal women, one woman from each household was considered for gathering required information.

Since, the study was based on the responses provided by the respondents and records given by BAIF during the investigation work, there have been some limitations to verify the information by any other means." (jacket)