A Study on Role Performance of Members of Farmer Interest Group

Indian farmer is the center of focus for development in the model and through an organized effort, farmers has a say in planning and implementation of the development process. Representation is provided to farmers at the village level through Farmers Interest Groups (FIGs). The present study was conducted mainly with the objective to study role performance of Farmers Interest Group (FIG) members working under ATMA project. For the study, Ahmednagar district was selected purposively as farmers interest groups under this district was high as compare to other district of Maharashtra region. Four tahasils viz., Sangamner, Newasa, Shrirampur and Ahmednagar were selected randomly and twenty four villages from those tahasils were selected randomly. From each FIG five members were randomly selected constituting the sample size 120. Ex-post facto research design was used for the study. Majority of the members had middle age, half of the members possessed secondary level of education, more than half of the members had medium level of farming experience, most of the members had medium size of land holding having medium annual income, more than half of the members sometimes used the source of information, less than half of the members had low social participation and half of the members had medium level of economic motivation about working of ATMA. More than half of the members fall in the category of medium role performance about working under ATMA.Major constraints faced by the members were the Scientist and SMS of ATMA use scientific language while providing information, which may create problem to understand, (78.34%) was perceived as their main constraint by farmers under ATMA project. Followed by large number of FIGs found variation in information provided by Govt. and NGOs (65.00%), Technology provided by ATMA is costly (35.00%), extra expenditure on cost of cultivation due to ATMA. (30.00%) then, Technology provided by ATMA affects traditional method (22.50%) and technology provided from ATMA is irrelevant with local nature (10.00%).