Caste and societal movement towards adoption of cross breeding technology in piggery: a case of ‘t&d’ pig breed in eastern india

The study explore the uptake of ‘T&D’ pig breed innovation among pig farming communities in Eastern region of India by revisiting diffusion of innovation theory. Livestock innovations must have maximum favourable attributes to attract the attention of the potential users of the technology. Most important attributes which draws farmers to the innovations are relative advantage over the technology it is going to replace, cultural compatibility and observability. Survey was conducted over 240 pig farmers’ purposively selected from four states, viz., Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal and one district was selected from each state, based on the concentration of pig farmers with the assistance of Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) in these states. As such, 240 pig farmers @ 60 pig farmers from each district were selected randomly across 4 states. Authors found that adoption of ‘T&D’ pig innovation was strongly influenced by socio-cultural grouping i,e. caste and other factors such as premium price, profitability, decrease in input cost, reduction in marketing uncertainty, litter size, comfort and time issue. Study revealed that the maximum pig farmers belonged to Schedule Tribe category (52.50%), Scheduled Caste community (28.30%), Other Backward Caste (11 The respondents from all the four states under the study stated that they typically received 100 per cent price premium on adoption of ‘T&D’ pig..70%) and 7.5 per cent of pig farmers belonged to General category in the study area.