Research

This study was conducted in 2018 to analyze the factors affecting the adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Agriculture in Vegetable Block, Neelakantha Municipality, Dhading. ICT is one of the emerging technologies in agriculture in order to provide right information at the right time for the right farmers.

Neelakantha Municipality ward number 3, 4, 7, 8 and 12 covering nearly 2000 ropnai area was declared as PMAMP Vegetable block in 2074/75. Neelakantha Municipality is one of the potential municipalities of Dhading district for vegetable production. This study was carried out in order to find the cause the factors affecting the adoption of ICT in agriculture by the vegetable growers. The study was divided into five clusters (ward number 3, 4, 7, 8 and 12). Simple random sampling technique was used to select the 150 samples (30 samples from each ward). Semi structured questionnaire was used to collect the information from the vegetable grower farmers. Adoption of ICT tools was used as dependent variable and age, gender, address (ward number), education level, population (family size), vegetable growing year, vegetable production income, vegetable land area  were used as independent variables. Forward LR method in Binary logistic regression model has shown age and education level had significant effect on adoption of ICT tools in agriculture. About 18 % of farmers were found to adopt the ICT tools for vegetable production activities. Even most of the farmers own ICT tools like mobile, radio, tv etc they were found to be unknown with the existence of present ICT tools like Mobile application, Website, Software. If extension agents were well trained for the dissemination of ICT tools as the extension advisory tools, then only farmers will be able to adopt the ICT tools for increasing the efficiency and productivity.