DYNAMICS IN RICE PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY – A STUDY IN JORHAT DISTRICT OF ASSAM
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Date
2023
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Abstract
More than half of the world's population relies on rice as the primary means of dietary habits, with Asia, South America, Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa as its major consuming regions. This emphasizes how crucial it is to sustain sufficient food for a large population. Enhancing the rice crop's output potential, stability, and nutritional value is of the utmost importance right now.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the technical advancements in rice farming from 1981 to 2022, the consequences on farm income and the challenges farmers endured in implementing new technology throughout time. In order to sustain the research purpose detailed information were collected from 120 samples of Jorhat district, especially Titabar, with the help of a properly structured schedule by personal interview method and the considered 41 years was divided into three periods viz. Period I-1981, Period-II 2015 and Period-III 2022. Findings revealed that average operational holding of the farmers had declined from 1.17 ha in 1981 and 2.00 ha in 2015 to 1.01 ha in 2022. Morever during 2022, cropping intensity (105.94) showed 20.63 per cent and 15.92 per cent decline from 1981and 2015 respectively. The type and amount of labour, quantity of fertilizer, seed rate and variety were found to be the areas where technological variations had the most obvious effects. Over the time, rapid mechanization led to a decrease in the utilization of human and animal labour in rice farming. In all of the periods, less fertilizer was applied than what Assam Agricultural University had recommended. However, because of the concurrent use of DAP and SSP, phosphorus application was found to be higher during 2015 and 2022. The seed rate used in the current period was within the range of recommendations, unlike the improbable excess use of seeds in 1981 and 2015. Since the fields were previously dominated by local varieties, the application of HYV of Sali rice on farms in later periods had altered the total input utilization. These technological changes over time had increased the yield, attributed to higher earnings of the farmers. Although net income had increased by 279.30 per cent over 1981, it had decreased by 22.95 per cent from 2015 at current price.
Over the periods, farmers had faced various challenges in adopting new technology, but the absence of irrigation infrastructure was consistently found to be a constraint to rice farming.