Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

ASSESSMENT OF WOMEN PREFERENCE FOR INFORMATION SOURCES TO MANAGE WATER AND FOREST RESOURCE IN LESSER HIMALAYA

Karuna Joshi and Neelam Bhardwaj

Abstract

The sustainable management of major resources like water and forest, particularly in hills, can be successfully done by adopting innovative technologies which can be fully harnessed if information sources are well utilized. In this context, the women centric study was conducted during the year 2012 and 2013 aiming to assess the preference of women for information sources to obtain knowledge as to how efficiently manage the water and forest resources in hills. Randomly selected 150 women from eight villages of lesser Himalaya constituted the sample of the study. This study revealed that managing water and forest in hills usually requires effective, combined and convenient information sources. One source supplements and complements another. Friends (personal localite), government agency personnel (personal cosmopolite) and pamphlets (mass media) were the most frequently utilized information sources. Regarding usability of information sources neighbors /friends (personal localite), government agency personnel/training programmes (personal cosmopolite) and pamphlets/radio (mass media) are very usable information sources by hill women. In addition to local resources, hill women communicate from outside the village (86 % women with medium level of localiteness-cosmopoliteness). Pamphlets/Television was available to most of the women (100/84.67 % of the sample). Though, availability of radio was less (47 % of sample) but its usability was high (66 % of sample). The information sources (personal localite, personal cosmopolite and mass media) were interrelated with each other along with their usability and frequency of utilization.