Study on adoption of cimate-smart system of wheat intensification (SWI) technology among the farmers of Bihar

Abstract

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is world’s most widely cultivated food crop. At initial decades of 21st century, one probability of a great famine appeared in the world due to long drought in tropics and subtropics and at the same time it appeared more dangerously because of the climate change threat. System of Wheat Intensification (SWI) which is based on the principles of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) is a new wheat cultivation technique which might act as a significantly new weapon as a part of climate-smart farming. It is one of the promising technologies to increase productivity which ultimately contributes to the household level food security of rural marginal farmers. The present study was conducted in Samastipur district of Bihar state in India. 4 panchayats (Thahara, Morsand, Indarwara, Sarangpur) were selected from 2 blocks of Samastipur based on assumption that these blocks have the largest number of adopters of SWI technology. The total number of respondents (beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries) selected for the study was 60. Frequency, percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation and t-test were used as the statistical tools. As the result, it was found that majority of the adopters (50%) had medium level of adoption followed by high level of adoption (40%) whereas; majority of the non-adopters (60%) had low level of adoption. The adopters have significantly higher mean adoption scores (46.96) than that of non-adopters (29.73). The computed t-value (13.61) was found to be highly significant which referred a significant difference in the mean adoption scores of adopters and non-adopters. Moreover, it was discerned that maximum number of respondents in partial adoption was due to lack of information source (80%) and maximum number of respondents in non-adoption was due to non-availability of labourers as well as lack of delivery system at village level (100%).