UTILIZATION PATTERN OF DIVERSE ICT TOOLS BY COASTAL FARMERS DURING THE WARNING STAGES OF CYCLONES

Abstract

Despitenumerous advanced scientific technologies, we are still at the mercy of some uncontrollable natural calamities. A tropical cyclone is one of the most devastating hydrological disasters among them. Along with violent wind, torrential rain, high wave, destructive storm surges and coastal flooding, the cyclone is responsible for considerable losses to Indian agriculture. After all, farmers are informed, aware, and cope with these difficulties successfully with past experiences, warn through various ICT tools, social media and organizational sources (Pratik and Vinaya, 2022). The study was carried out with a specific objective to determine the utilization pattern of information sources in the cyclone’s early warning stages. Purposively the state of Odisha was selected because it is vulnerable to cyclonic events. 8 villages from 2 coastal districts of the state were considered for the study, and 20 respondents from each village made the sample size 160. The primary data was collected through a well-structured interview schedule and analyzed using appropriate statistical tools. Results divulged that Television was available to 96.25 percent of the respondents, followed by Mobile phones (71.25%), Smartphone (67.50%), Radio (35.63%), Laptop (22.50%), Personal computer (14.38%) and Tablets (5.53%). TV news was the major social media with mean score (3.55) ranked first, followed by SMS (3.50) and Whatsapp (3.26) which the majority of the farmers regularly retrieve information. In contrast, Blog, with a mean score (2.04) was the least used social media by a small proportion of farmers to gain information before cyclones. With comparision to information access through various social media sources, independent variables such as Education, social participation, annual family income, source of credit were found to be positively significant at 1% level of significance, p<0.01, while mass media exposure and extension contact were at 5% level of significance. In the community, there were 5 primary organizational sources, out of which 51.87% of respondents informed through all of the organization where 19.38% of respondents were from 4 sources, followed by 11.88% from 3 sources, 13.75% from 2 sources and 3.12% from a single source. Early warning and information create a great advantage in dealing with such climatic vagaries.