Bose and Chowdhury

efforts to organise training programmes in their village level itself for updating

the knowledge and skill of rural women in various farm and home activities. It

was noted by Sadaf et al. (2006) that the majority of the rural women strongly

agreed about the essentiality of agricultural extension services. They also noted

that the majority of the respondents have preferred female extension agents to

guide and equip them with latest agricultural technology. Doss (2001) found that

female farmers, especially female-headed households, were often not contacted

by extension services. As suggested by Jiggins et al. (1997) that women farmers’

access to extension services must lead to concrete improvements for rural women

themselves, as well as to enhance the productivity of the agricultural sector and

national food security through increasing marketed output. Although encouraging

effects have been made but these successes still fall far short of what is considered

necessary at this time (FAO, 1997). In view of the above, the present study was

undertaken to study the extent of contact of the women paddy cultivators with

change agents.

Methodology

The present study was undertaken in randomly selected two blocks; i.e. Bolpur-

Sriniketan Block and Illambazar Block of Bolpur sub-division of Birbhum District,

West Bengal. Since the kharif paddy is the most important major crop (in terms

of area and employment of farm labour) in the study area, hence the present study

was confined to kharif paddy cultivation. For the study 250 farm women were

selected by employing the simple random sampling technique. In the next stage,

five villages were selected randomly from the selected two blocks. Finally, twenty

five farm women of each village were selected for the ultimate sample unit of the

study. Personal interview method was applied to collect the data with the help of

pre-tested structured interview schedule.

Results

Network research has shown that the degree of structural closure in a network,

defined as the extent to which an actor’s network contacts are connected to one

another, has important implications for generating novel ideas and exercising

social influence. A high degree of structural closure creates a cohesive network

of tightly linked social actors, and a low degree of structural closure creates a

network with “structural holes” and brokerage potential (Burt, 2005; Coleman,

1988).As per the extent/frequency of contact of respondents with change agents in

paddy cultivation, it has been observed that respondents had interaction with input

dealers, and they had the highest rank. Second rank was obtained by KPS followed

by RRB/Co-operatives, KVK‘s, various NGOs, ADO and scientist (Table 1).

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