Comparison for Yield Potential of Chickpea in Cluster Front Line Demonstrations and Farmer's Practices in Rainfed Areas of Bilaspur District of Himachal Pradesh

Realizing the importance of cluster frontline demonstrations in transfer of latest technologies, Krishi Vigyan Kendra are regularly conducting CFLDs on pulse crops at farmer's field with the objective of convincing farmers and extension functionaries together about the production potentialities of production technologies for further wide scale diffusion. To boost the production and productivity of chickpea pulse crop and to find out the yield gap, a total of 312 numbers of cluster frontline demonstrations on chickpea were conducted in 156 numbers of adopted villages of the four blocks of the Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh under rainfed conditions for consecutive 4 years (2015-16 to 2018-19). For comparison with recommended practices prevailing farmers' practices were treated as control. The findings of the study revealed that irrespective of the chickpea varieties used in demonstrations, percent increase in demonstrations yield over farmers practice ranged from 24.6 to 95.1 per cent. It was further observed that in terms of economics chickpea crop recorded higher net returns per hectare in demonstration plots compared to farmer's practice during all the years of studies. The extension gap and technological gap ranged between1.5-5.9 q/ha and 0.9-12.4 q/ha, respectively. The benefit cost ratio which indicates that whether CFLD technology is profitable or not varied from 2.22, to 3.8 during the study period and was always higher in demonstrations plots over farmers practice. The per cent technology index varied from 6.92 to 51.67 per cent indicating urgent need to make aware and motivate the farmers to adopt improved and economically viable technologies for chickpea production.