Abstract
Social capital is an important dimension for rural development which helps in transforming people into active citizens by adopting a bottom-up approach, influencing the ability of individuals and groups to cooperate in taking advantages of emerging opportunities. Social capital, if built among the resource poor women, can jointly take up economic activities to improve their livelihood. This study was carried out to explore the dynamics of social capital among the resource poor schedule caste and schedule tribe rural women through mushroom cultivation as an agro-based enterprise using locally available agricultural wastes. An Ex-post Facto Cause to Effect design was used to analyse the impact of social capital. The number of people with low social capital decreased from 31 to 20% and those in medium and high social capital categories increased from 45 to 47.5% and 24 to 32.5%, respectively. These variables help the self help group members to expose to new situations and thereby facilitate them to attempt collective action. Correlation analysis revealed that all the domains of social capital were significant. The variables such as education, cosmopoliteness and mass media usage were significantly (p Key words: Extension interventions; Social capital; Sustainable rural livelihood. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/tar.v22i3.3696 Tropical Agricultural Research 22(3) (2011) 230-238
Highlights
Vulnerable individuals and communities often tend to be impoverished
Social capital is an important dimension for development which is shrinking in developing countries in recent years
Overall social capital status of the respondents and its contributing factors The analysis presented in Table 2 shows that there was a significant impact on all the domains of the social capital due to the extension interventions carried out as part of the research study
Summary
Social capital is an important dimension for development which is shrinking in developing countries in recent years. Sound social capital would play a decisive role in creating sustainable livelihood among rural masses. As Pretty and Ward (2001) pointed out “the term captures the idea that social bonds and norms are important for sustainable livelihoods. The social capital is linked to people, their lives and their surroundings. Social capital can be defined as the resources available to one through the networks that they hold. Coleman (1988) described social capital as “The structure of relations between actors and among actors and that encourages productive activities”. According to World Bank (1999) social capital refers to “The institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions. Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions
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