Impact 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 kannada 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 attributional quotient (0.92) towards KMR-204,
implying continued usage of variety. To conclude that the respondents obtained almost equal yields
and income from the from the selected Finger millet varieties. The respondents had favourable
perception towards KMR-204 variety.