Attitudes of rural youth towards agriculture as an occupation

The importance of agriculture to the socio-economic development of the country cannot be overemphasized. Agriculture sector is potentially the largest employment providing sector in the country. Despite this, unemployment is high among rural youth, who prefer to migrate to urban areas to take up low paying jobs. The present study was carried out mainly to find out the attitude of youth towards agriculture as an occupation. Keeping this in view, a study was conducted in Warangal district of Telangana state with a total sample of 120 youth who are selected using simple random sampling technique. The objective of the study was to know the attitude of youth towards agriculture as occupation. The data was collected from primary sources with structured interview schedule. The study employed descriptive statistics and rank order method to analyse the data. The study indicated that one third (34.2%) of the total youth had neutral attitude towards agriculture. It is followed by moderately favourable (28.3%) and moderately unfavourable (18.4%) attitude towards agriculture, whereas only 10.8 per cent and 8.3 per cent of them had highly favourable and highly unfavourable attitude respectively. As a whole, leading portion of the youth inclined towards favourable attitude towards farming. Among male youth one third (33.4%) had moderately favourable attitude towards agriculture, followed by neutral attitude (30.0%) and same per cent (13.3%) had highly favourable and moderately unfavourable attitude towards agriculture, and only 10.0 per cent of them had highly unfavourable attitude. Among female youth more than one third (38.4%) had neutral attitude towards agriculture, followed by same per cent (23.3%) had moderately favourable and moderately unfavourable attitude towards agriculture, whereas only 8.4 per cent and 6.6 per cent of them had highly favourable and highly unfavourable attitude respectively.