Indigenous Technical Knowledge on Coleus Crop Cultivation

This study was conducted at Salem district of Tamil Nadu. Ten villages were selected by using simple random sampling procedure .One hundred twenty coleus growers were selected from ten selected revenue villages for the study. The Indigenous technical knowledge of coleus plant cultivation was collected by participatory mode of focused group interview with ten groups. The respondents were asked to indicate the problems faced by them, while cultivating coleus crop. The problems enlisted were interpreted based on percentage analysis. There were eleven indigenous technical knowledge (ITK) documented with respect to coleus crop cultivation of which four indigenous technology were pertaining to crop production and seven pertaining to crop protection aspects .With respect to crop protection, the chemical secret from the sorghum ischolar_main will help to solve the potash in deficit the soil that might be the probable reason for 91.67 per cent of the respondents reported the cultivation of coleus crop immediately after the harvest of sorghum which will increase the tuber yield of crop .There were 17 constraints reported by the respondents. Most important constraints were lack of fixed price policy for medicinal plant like coleus by the government, insufficient research input management for medicinal crop based cropping system, inadequate storage facilities , lack of knowledge on processing and lack of co operatives for marketing as expressed by 52.00-70.00 per cent of the respondents.