Studies on Awareness Pattern and Communication Behaviour among Potato Growers in Relation to Different Diseases and their Control Measures

Potato is an important tuber crop which is a staple food to millions of people in the world. The crop is attacked by several diseases, which not only affect production /yield but also affect its quality. For effective disease management strategy, an adequate knowledge of host, pathogen and agro-climate conditions is the pre-requisite. In the absence of proper knowledge with the farmers, most of the diseases remain beyond control inspite of readily recommendations and huge application of pesticides. A study on awareness pattern and communication behaviour among potato growers of Ambala and Kurukshetra districts were undertaken about different aspect of potato diseases. The results obtained indicated that almost all the potato growers were well acquainted with the symptomatology but only few farmers were aware about the weather factors and recurrence of the disease. In most cases, farmers were noticed to spray their crop as a routine practice adopted (i.e. after the appearance of disease symptoms) which was also a limiting factor in the perfect disease management. The study on information sources revealed that 75 per cent of farmers were well aware about the KVK’s followed by fellow farmers (67per cent) television (56per cent),other sources(42.5per cent), State Dept.’s(32.5per cent), radio (26.7per cent), farm literature (30per cent) and ICT(13.3per cent) . As far as the evaluation of different sources of information is concerned, KVK was considered the most relevant source of information by the farmers.