Participation in Decision Making - A Study of Female Farmers in the Rural Area of Sikkim in North-Eastern India

The topic of the researcher is "Role of female labour in farming sector: a study of state of Sikkim". Various parameters have been studied under this heading of which decision making in crop production and animal husbandry and related activities is one of them. The present paper has presented the findings pertaining to this parameter. For this, data was collected from 230 female farmers through interviews using a pre-designed schedule from 24 circles from all the four districts of Sikkim State in North-Eastern India. Based on their subjective judgments, Descriptive as well as inferential statistics were used to analyze and interpret the data of decision making in fourteen crop production and animal husbandry activities using the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Percentage, mean, standard deviation (SD), coefficient of variation (CV) of descriptive statistics and one sample t-test of inferential statistics has been used to interpret the data. The finding of the data has shown that they do participate in decision making for some of the activities in which their independent participation is more than that of men. Moreover, joint involvement in decision making was observed in agricultural/animal and the related activities even though women perform more in agricultural related activities than men. Even they need not be consulted at the time of purchase of animals or change of crop.