COMMUNICATION BEHAVIOUR OF EXTENSION PERSONNEL IN PROGRESSIVE AND NON PROGRESSIVE DISTRICTS OF ASSAM

Bordiloi RM., Makhija VK. and Laharia SN.

The present study was undertaken in Nagaon and Lakhimpur districts of Assam state to know the communication behaviour of extension personnel as well as to ascertain the correlates associated with their communication behaviour.
A multistage, proportionate, stratified random sampling design was adopted for selection of the respondents. Nagaon and Lakhimpur were selected as progressive and non progressive districts based on the criteria followed by Raghudbaran et al. (1976). Total number of respondents was 49 having 24 from progressive and 25 from non progressive districts. Data collection was done personally with the help of protested structured schedules.
The study revealed that about 50 per cent of the respondents in both progressive and non progressive districts had ‘medium’ level of communication behaviour followed by ‘high’ (36.73%) and ‘low’ (10.20%). Comparatively more respondents (37.50%) in progressive district showed ‘high’ level of communication behaviour than non-progressive district (28.00%).
Senior officials, colleagues, agricultural scientists, radio, TV, newspaper, demonstrations, field days and Package of Practices booklet were most commonly used sources of information. The methods followed by majority of the respondents for evaluation of agricultural information were discussion with senior officers (73.50%), discussion with colleagues (67.30%), past experiences (67.30%) and discussion with progressive farmers (53%). Majority of the respondents (>70%) used to store information by preparing short notes. It was also reported by most of them that they used to convert the scientific information into local dialect in the form of handouts, posters, success stories and popular articles. Radio talks were delivered by 60 percent respondents only.
No independent variable exhibited a significant correlation with communication behaviour of the respondents in progressive and non-progressive district separately. However, with the pooled data, four variables, viz., age, total service experience, training and availability of communication facilities exhibited significant relationship. Amongst these, first two variables had a negative trend while the other two had positive correlation with communication behaviour of the respondents.

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