Vol. 12, Issue 8 (2023)

Author(s):
Adarsh Sharma, Poonam Chakrawarty, Abhilasha Sharma and KN Pathak

Abstract:
In order to enhance the production and productivity of agriculture, farmers should have access to well organized, relevant information and their sufficient utilization requires good facilitation among the users. The present study is expected to identify farmer’s knowledge and utilization pattern of online information sources during COVID-19 situation, which provides them direction to focus more on selection of available preferred online information sources. The current study was conducted in Narsinghpur district primarily due to majority of farmer uses online information sources in the district and well known area by the researcher. A total of 10 villages were selected from Chawarpatha block from Narsinghpur district. 11 respondents were selected from each village for the survey purpose. The study yields that Kisan mobile sandesh was most popular among the farmers followed by mobile phone, Agril. apps, social media (Facebook, WhatsApp, telegram etc.), YouTube, websites/web portals, e-books/e-magazine/e-newspaper, Kisan call centre, video conferencing, meeting apps (Google meet, zoom, webex etc.), e –NAM, digital videos and e-mail. Further, it was found that, based on overall utilization pattern of online information sources, majority of the farmers belonged to occasionally utilization pattern (36.37%) followed by regular (32.73%) and never (30.90%) utilization pattern of online information sources.