Use of ICT-Enabled Services for Empowerment of Dairy Farmers in Andhra Pradesh

The present study was conducted in five districts, namely, Anantapur, Ranga Reddy, Nalgonda, Krishna and East Godavari, of Andhra Pradesh State with a sample size of 240 dairy farmers (120 each of Information and communication technology (ICT) users and non-users) to measure their empowerment through ICT. Four components of empowerment of dairy farmers, namely, knowledge regarding dairy farming, decision-making ability, attitude towards dairying and self-confidence, were selected based on relevancy, literature and experts’ opinion. The scale developed by Chaudhari et al. was used to measure the decision-making ability and self-confidence; the test developed by Vijay Babu was used to measure knowledge; and the scale developed by Sah was used to measure attitude. It was observed that the mean values of components of empowerment of the dairy farmers, i.e. knowledge, decision-making ability, attitude and self-confidence of ICT users were 40.70, 11.6, 9.80 and 4.60, respectively, and that of non-users of ICT were 28.25, 9.24, 9.33 and 3.35, respectively. The mean values of overall empowerment of ICT user and non-user dairy farmers were found to be 16.59 and 12.54, respectively. Through Z-test, it was also found that the components of empowerment, namely, knowledge, decision making, self-confidence and overall empowerment of dairy farmers between ICT users and non-users, were found to be significant at 0.01 level of probability, whereas no significant difference was found between them as far as attitude was concerned.