Empowerment of Rural Women in Vegetable Production for Nutritional Security

Abstract

Rural women play an important role in both household and socio economic newlinedevelopment of the society. Development of any nation will be impossible without developing newlinethis important and substantial segment of our society. Women perform a perceptible role in a newlinevariety of agricultural operations. They are actively involved in the cultivation of various crops, newlineas well as vegetable production and kitchen gardening. Realizing the importance of rural women newlinein vegetable production and knowing the extent of training needs of these rural women, the newlinestudy entitled and#8213;Empowerment of rural women in vegetable production for nutritional newlinesecurityand#8214; was planned with following objectives: To study the work profile of rural women in newlinehomestead gardening. To assess the existing knowledge and practice of rural women on newlinevegetable production. To empower rural women in vegetable production through intervention newlineand assess its impact. The present study was conducted in Jorhat district of Assam state. From newlineJorhat sub-division three blocks namely Kaliapani, Dhekorgorah and Chipahikhola were newlineselected for the study. From each block three villages were selected and from each village 50 newlinerespondents were selected by simple random sampling method who were involved in vegetable newlineproduction activities. Thus all total four hundred fifty (450) rural women from nine villages newlinewere the respondents for the present study. The study revealed that majority of the rural women newlinewere of middle age group (58.22%), married (91.55%), educated up to middle school level newline(31.56%) belonged to OBC/MOBC category (73.77%) had nuclear type of family (80.23 %), newlinewere having farming as their main occupation (38.89%), had agricultural land 1-3 bigha newline(38.00%) majority of them had pucca house (48.22%). More than 69 per cent had medium newlinesocio-economic status. All the respondents were using biocompost as their main source of newlinefertilizer, had poor contact with extension personnel, lack of time due to over burden of newlinehousehold work was the main problem faced by the respondents in attendi...