A Study on Swarm-Intelligence in Group Decision-Making of Farmers’ Self-Help Groups in Uttarakhand, India

The concept and utility of self-help groups (SHGs) are proven facts, and they have significantly contributed to group-led extension activities on a large scale. These SHGs play an instrumental role in empowering their members and in many core aspects of farming. Still, these groups also face various challenges, among which ineffective group decision-making is prominent. Therefore, it is critical to strengthen the SHGs by resolving the issues of stability for strengthening the extension system in light of agriculture and rural development at the national level. Swarm intelligence is a phenomenon through which the swarm of honeybees perform various group tasks and takes crucial group decisions effectively and efficiently, utilizing their collective intelligence. Therefore, the study was intended to map the group decision processes among honeybee swarms and their inbuilt influences to relate them to the decision-making processes among SHGs. The present study inferred that seven key factors, i.e. decision impulse, conviction of the decision, engagement in decision, decision duration, decision alignment, extent of participation and real-time physical negotiation, contributed to the effectiveness of swarm-intelligence-based group decision-making