Vol. 10, Issue 9 (2021)

Author(s):
Surabhi Hota

Abstract:
India is a developing country and its roots are strengthened by agriculture as India is a dominantly agrarian country. The economic development of the country largely depends upon the development of agriculture sector. 70 percent of rural population in India belongs to the farming community. But the agriculture in the rural poor faces numbers of problems, biotic, abiotic or policy related in origin. To address the problem of the rural agriculture sector is the key to development in true sense. Hence the study was an attempt to identify and prioritize the problems by means of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in a village named Managundi in South India. Snowball sampling was used to identify the 30 Respondent Farmers (RFs) who represent the different categories of farmers in the village through three Key Informants (KIs). The problem ranking was done by RFs and KIs. Rank Based Quotient (RBQ) was calculated based on the ranking. It was found that water scarcity was the most prior problem in the study area based on economic terms, using value-based index (VBI) derived through RBQ. Also, a perfect spearman’s rank correlation between VBI based ranking given by the RFs and KIs showed the importance of snowball sampling in village problem identification. And subsequently the solutions were suggested based on the physiography and availability of resources in the village.