Central Rice Research Institute Annual report...2011-12

CRRI finger weeder- a women friendly implement
planned. A group of 30 farm women who participated
in the trial and worked with two rows transplanter and
finger weeder as well as in traditional method gave
their qualitative assessment. The farm women favoured
the CRRI two rows transplanter on account of ‘quick in
doing job’, ‘socially acceptable’ and ‘prestigious’ very
strongly (score above 2.5 out of 3 in the rating scale).
The other positive points which were endorsed strongly
(score 2-2.5) were on ‘generation of higher income’,
‘easy in doing the transplanting’ and ‘bright future of
the machine’. The negative points on ‘fear of accident’
and ‘more mistakes in operation’ were strongly denied.
The feedback provided by women farmers on the technologies
had led to draw useful recommendations for
refinement of programmes on farm implements for
women. The highest net return (Rs. 25,880 ha -1 ) and
benefit: cost ratio (2.30) were recorded in the plots where
the crop was established by transplanter and mechanical
weeding by finger-weeder (20 DAT) followed by
manual removal of weeds within rows. This could be
due to reduction in the labour cost in mechanical transplanting
and weeding.
Development and maintenance of rice
knowledge management portal
CRRI as consortium partner of NAIP (Component
1) funded project developed a digital photo library on
rice related information such as various stages of rice
plant growth, insect pests of rice, diseases of rice, implements/machineries
used for production and post-harvest
of rice, varieties and other general photographs.
Besides, documents of Government schemes and extension
programmes on rice were collected, digitized
and sent for uploading in rice portal. Sixty one-minute
spot films and one 17 minute documentary film were
made by CRRI which are available on the portal. The
shooting of the film was done at Cuttack, Hazaribag,
Almora, Gerua, Ludhiana and Kochi. In order to make
the portal popular, a capacity building workshop was
organized for 60 participants from Odisha, Bihar,
Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh at CRRI, Cuttack. The
participants were exposed to the Rice Knowledge Management
Portal and its utility in disseminating rice related
information to farming community.
100 CRRI ANNUAL REPORT 2011-12