THE ROLE OF DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION SERVICE (AIS) FOR EMPOWERING BANGLADESHI FARMERS

The Development Communication Tools (DCTs) of the Agriculture Information Service (AIS) play an important role in disseminating agricultural information. Farmers’ exposure to these DCTs of AIS influences higher crop production and better farm management. The main purpose of this study was to determine and describe the exposure of DCTs of AIS by the farmers in receiving agricultural information. The individual socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers have been explored from the study and the relationship between the exposure of respondents to DCTs of AIS and their selected characteristics has been determined too. Data were collected from randomly selected 80 farmers of five villages of Dumuria upazila under Khulna district of Bangladesh, by using a structured interview schedule through personal interviews. Appropriate Likert scales were used to measure the concerned variables. Spearman’s Ranked Correlation Coefficient (ρ) was used to test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The farmers were exposed to 13 out of 14 DCTs of AIS. However, the majority (72.5 %) of the respondents showed very low exposure to DCTs of AIS. The respondents were highly exposed to posters or stickers (65.93%), while they were less exposed to the ICT laboratory (0.94%). Other important DCTs as exposed by the farmers were folder/leaflet/flipchart (64.69%), a television program (54.06%), an agricultural fair (50.93%), and AisTube (1.87%). Among 13 selected characteristics of the respondents, the level of education, farm size, annual family income, cosmopolitanism, innovativeness, extension contact, organizational participation, training, knowledge, and attitude were positively correlated with their level of exposure to the DCTs of AIS. Half (50.00%) of the respondents confronted a medium extent of the problem and 43.75 % confronted a high extent of the problem while a few of them (6.25%) reported a low extent of the problem for being exposed to the DCTs of AIS. Unavailability of personal mobile, TV, and radio was the highly confronted problem (90.00%) followed by lack of resources (87.95%), internet (82.08%), and transportation facilities (78.30%) by the farmers in receiving agricultural information. The AIS authority could revise its policy for the improvement of DCTs based on the findings from the current study.