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ThesisItem Open Access TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURAL PRACTICES IN MUGA SILK PRODUCTION IN NORTH LAKHIMPUR DISTRICT OF ASSAM(AAU, Jorhat, 2018) PEGU, KARPUNPULI; Dutta, L. C.Sericulture, or silk farming, is the rearing of silkworms for the production of raw silk. It is an agro based labour intensive industry providing gainful employment mostly for rural people. Sericulture includes cultivation of 4 varieties of silkworm mainly mulberry, eri, muga and tasar. The golden silk muga is the gift of nature to the state and it is the pride of Assam. Muga rearers of Assam have been practicing this culture with traditional indigenous practices. Traditional knowledge is generated by the local people with their own experience and experimentation to meet their needs and these are sustainable in nature. Considering this, the present study was conducted to identify and document various Indigenous Traditional Knowledge in muga silk production, to study the extent of use of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge in relation to the socio-economic profile of the respondents and to find out the problems perceived by the muga rearers in North Lakhimpur district of Assam. A random sampling design was followed to obtain a sample size of 120 respondents. Ten independent and one dependent variable was selected for the study. The statistical techniques used for the analysis of data were frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, spearman’s correlation co-efficient and weighted mean score (WMS). The findings revealed that 50 per cent of the muga rearers belonged to age group of 36-50 yrs and 55.80 per cent had their education up to middle school. Moreover, 41.70 per cent of the rearers belonged to Other Backward Class, 52.50 per cent of the respondent had medium family size, 40 per cent of the members had income ranging from Rs.75001-100000 and 40 per cent of the members have small size land holding, whereas 68.40 per cent, 70.83 per cent and 58.40 per cent of the respondents had medium level of extension contact, risk bearing ability and decision making ability and on the other hand 40.80 per cent of the respondents have received training exposure. The study further revealed that 64.17 per cent of the respondent had medium level of extent of use of ITK in the district. It was affirmed from the findings that age, family size and size of operational land holding were found to be positive and significant whereas education, extension contact and training exposure were negative and significantly correlated with the extent of use of ITK. On the other hand caste, annual family income, risk bearing ability and decision making ability were found to be positive and non significant with the extent of use of ITK. Major problems reported by muga rearers included lack of capital, glamour, people are not interested to lease their land for muga rearing, impact of environmental pollution, lack of availability of machinery, inadequate marketing facilities, unaffordable cost of hiring vehicles and lack of need based training.
