Study on Representative Farmers in the Activities and Constraints of Agricultural Technology Management Agency

Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA) at district level is increasingly responsible for all the technology dissemination activities in various blocks within the district. It has linkage with all the line departments, research organization and agencies associated with agricultural development in the district. Hence, present investigation was undertaken with an objective to study personal characteristics of the representative farmers in the light of their socio-economic conditions, to assess the knowledge about the function and activities related to ATMA and to study the constraints of representative farmers in their involvement in various programmes and activities. The present study was conducted in the Amravati District which comes in the vidharbha region of Maharashtra State during the year 2005-2006. For the present research work the Amravati District ATMA was purposively selected. Thus a list of representative farmers was obtained from the office of the Project Director ATMA Amravati. The method of personal interview was used for the data collection and the data from all the selected sample respondents was collected. The respondent farmers were personally contacted for their interview purpose. Present study concluded that 13 per cent respondents were also having up to 5 ha of land. The social participation level of most of respondents was medium and about one third of the respondents had higher level, showing a trend that most of the representative farmers were with social interest in the village development. The knowledge level of the respondents about ATMA activities was medium shown by majority (62.6%) of the respondents. It is further noted in the same table that about one-fifth farmers also, had higher level of knowledge. It is also seen that a good number of respondents (16.53%), had also shown low level of knowledge. About 30 per cent showed medium level involvement and the least number among the respondents was that of those with low level of involvement.