The impact of social and digital media on empowering rural women farmers and promoting inclusive agricultural development enables rural women producers to become more self-reliant in agriculture and fosters sustainable agricultural development. This research examines the impact of social and digital media on rural women farmers, focusing on how they access, use, and perceive these platforms for agricultural information. An ex-post facto research design was adopted. The study was conducted in the U.T. of Puducherry, which covered 120 women farmers categorised as marginal, small and large farmers. Descriptive statistics were employed to assess the distribution of respondents with respect to their access to and awareness of social and digital media. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to find the variation in constraints among the farmers. The result revealed that the difficulty in understanding and getting relevant information had strongly correlated among the 17 constraints. Similarly, in technical constrains irrelevant information and adequate information had strongly correlated. Some constraints were moderately correlated for marginal and small farmers, whereas, some constraints were weakly correlated for large farmers. Overall, the study indicated that, the level of each constraints would be varying with the size of holding of the women farmers. The study concluded that farmers possessed a moderate level of innovativeness and attitude towards social and digital media, indicating that significant potential for improvement in usage of social and digital media. While awareness and access to basic social media platforms like WhatsApp and YouTube were relatively high, the effective utilization of advanced digital tools remains limited. Policy interventions should focus on eenhancing access to affordable internet and digital infrastructure, providing need-based and inclusive training programs, developing region-specific and vernacular digital content, and encouraging institutional support through government, NGOs, and private sector participation.
Parthasarathi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.