Indigenous plant protection practices in dry land agricultural agro ecosystems: Rationality of farmers’ knowledge system

In recent past, the farmers’ knowledge has received increased attention. Looking its importance a study was carried out, six randomly selected villages from two blocks, one from each of Bhiwani and Mahendergarh districts of Haryana state. To explore indigenous technological knowledge (ITKs) farmers with 10 years of experience were selected randomly from each village. Thus, making a total of 180 farmers from six villages. For testing rationality of each explored ITK, 40 agricultural scientists were selected. Data pertaining to study were taken by using personal interview method with open- ended and objective types of questions. Results indicated that 37 of ITKs were explored from farmers which are used against different insect pest management of various crops. Twenty four ITKs were found to be rational as perceived by farmers. Whereas 13 of ITKs were observed to be irrational by the farmers. Same numbers of ITKs were perceived as rational and irrational by agricultural scientists. It could be inferred that there was very less gap in weighting the rationality of explored ITKs by farmers and agricultural scientists both.