Livelihood Security Status of Dry-Land Karnataka PDF Download

Author: M. Chinnadurai
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Though dry lands constitute over 40 percent of the earth's surface and contribute a lot to food and nutritional security, they still continue to be 'unappreciated gifts of nature'. Poverty continues to thrive in these lands and even when there is a high correlation between poverty and dryness, most investments in development still get made in to what is considered as high potential areas. Thus marginalization of the dryland regions in the world has contributed to the persistence of poverty and continuing concerns about malnutrition, water insecurity, land degradation, and poor dissemination of improved technologies. This paper is an attempt to analyze the livelihood security status of the two dry-land taluks (Hadagali and Kudligi) in the Bellary district of Karnataka. The objective of the paper is to construct livelihood security index of the households by identifying the existing agricultural and non-agricultural activities of all the 120 sample households classified under marginal, small and medium households. Such an analysis would reveal several pressing needs of the dryland population which in turn would be helping in targeted policy advocation. The study revealed that income from agriculture and allied activities formed the major share (86.7 percent) of the sample households with medium landholdings, and lowest among marginal households (42.62 percent). Though livestock played vital role in supplementing the family income it was also found that rearing of sheep and goat as not profitable. The share of borrowings exceeded 50 percent in all the households. The medium households were found to be well-off when compared to others but it was also found that their total consumption expenditure slumped by 34.2 percent during the period of lean agriculture. It was found that during lean season the marginal households were able to fend themselves off better as they could switch to other nonagricultural options but small and medium households find it difficult to pursue options other than farming. In general the overall livelihood security index was high among medium (53.65 per cent) when compared with small (46.43 percent) and marginal households (38.44 percent).