Training needs of tribal youth and constraints faced by tribal youth in choosing agricultural enterprises

Youth is that vibrant time in a person’s life when they can channel their vigour and energy into influencing the course of an entire country. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (1985) considers “youth group” in India as the person under the age group of 15 to 35 years. Tribal youth refer to the youth community belonging to the age group of 15-35 years and have commonality in terms of name, culture, dialect, territory and taboos. Identifying the training needs is the first step of any training programme for a specific target group. The training for tribal youth could serve as an effective tool for developing positive attitude with improved confidence and greater willingness towards agricultural enterprises. This further could help in development of training modules in various agricultural enterprises. It was observed that the overall Training Need Index (TNI) of the study area was 0.48, which was under medium training needs. Within that paddy crop production had 0.46 and Dairy farming had 0.51 index values. It was also observed that only one training need area had high level of training need i.e., selection of variety (0.63) and very high training need level i.e., Health management of dairy animal (0.81). The important constraints reported by the tribal youth were lack of participation in Panchayat Raj System, absence of dairy unit, problems in identification of animal diseases, inadequate irrigation facilities, low rate of milk, etc.