Impact Analysis of Finger Millet Varieties on Yield and Income of the Farmers in Mandya District, Karnataka

The Finger Millet (Eleusine coracana L.) is a staple food in southern Karnataka popularly known and called as ‘Ragi’ in Indian vernacular language. To enhance its productivity the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru (UASB) is engaged in evolving location specific, farmer need based farm technologies through its Zonal Agricultural Research Stations (ZARS) spread over in Southern Karnataka since its inception 1965. To its credit, it has developed and released many farm technologies for the farmers to adopt. Among these, the improved high yielding Finger Millet variety KMR-204 was one. It has genetic advantages over the other local varieties, such as high yielding, blast tolerance, short duration and preferred for late sowing when rains are delayed. Such improved variety was released and recommended during 2011 for wider adoption for the growers in southern dry zone of Karnataka. Since then, many growers had adopted the variety. After lapse of 5 years of its release, the UASB was interested in to find out the performance of the technology on the farmers field and their perception in gaining economic returns when compared to other local varieties. From this backdrop the study was conducted during 2016 in Mandya district, Karnataka, where there is large area under the Finger Millet crop. The district has 7 taluks, from each taluk 2 Finger Millet growing villages were selected. From 14 villages, 210 respondents who have adopted both KMR-204 and Indaf -9 varieties (Before) were selected randomly and interviewed and information was collected. A research design ‘Before and After’ was adopted to compare the results. The findings of the study reveal that, the KMR-204 had given more grain and straw yield compared to that of Indaf-9 variety used before under both rainfed and irrigated conditions. However, the difference in obtaining grain and straw yields was non-significant. Similarly, in case of obtaining net income, though the respondents obtained relatively more income from KMR-204 compared to Indaf-9, the difference was non-significant. Thus the alternate hypothesis is rejected by accepting the null hypothesis. The respondents had favourable perception, with high attibutional quotient (0.92) towards KMR-204, implying speedier diffusion of technology in the social system for adoption. To conclude that the respondents obtained almost equal yields and income from the from the selected Finger millet varieties. The respondents had favourable perception (attributional index-0.92) towards KMR-204 variety, implying speedier diffusion of technology in to the social system in due course of time.