FARMERS’ IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS THROUGH PARTICIPATION IN CIGs

Abstract

The study is aimed at exploring the improvement of socio-economic status of the CIG farmers and finding out the relationships between the selected characteristics of the farmers and their improvement of socio-economic status. Data were collected by using a pre-tested interview schedule from the farmers of three unions of Biral Upazila under Dinajpur district. Data were collected from randomly selected 105 respondents of the total 1050 CIG farmers from 20 December, 2018 to 25 January, 2019. The selected 10 characteristics of the farmers such as age, education, family size, farm size, farming experience, annual income, training experience, organizational participation, desirability, and use of information sources were considered as the explanatory variables where improvement of socio-economic status of the farmers considered as the focus issue of the study. Improvement of socio-economic status of the farmers was measured by 4-point rating scale. The observed score of overall improvement of socio-economic status of the farmers ranged from 2 to 48 while the possible range was 0 to 48. The mean improvement of socio-economic status score was 25.90 with a standard deviation of 9.64. Among the farmers, 67.6 percent belonged to medium improvement of socio-economic status while 16.2 percent of them had high improvement of socio-economic status and 16.2 percent had low improvement of socio-economic status. The variation regarding different aspects of improvement of socio-economic status was medium, the highest improvement of socio-economic status was observed in food security aspects and that was the lowest in technological aspects. Six out of ten selected characteristics of the farmers are education, farm size, training experience, organizational participation, desirability and use of information sources had significant positive relationships with their improvement of socio-economic status. Rests of the characteristics are age, family size, farming experience and annual income had no significant relationship with their improvement of socio-economic status.