Own Grown Food Concept - Perception of Urbanites of Twin Cities of Telangana State

Abstract

The present study entitled ‘Own Grown Food Concept - Perception of Urbanites of Twin Cities about Urban Farming’ has been conducted to assess the perception of the urbanites about the urban farming and its relationship with profile characteristics. An Ex-post facto research design was followed for the study. The investigation was carried out in twin cities of Telangana namely, Hyderabad and Secunderabad comprising Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, because twin cities have large number of active urban farming practitioners compared to all other towns and cities in Telangana, in addition to this, Urban Farming Division, Department of Horticulture, Telangana organized trainings in urban farm management and distributed urban farming kits to urbanites in twin cities. All the six zones comprising twin cities (L.B Nagar, Charminar, Khairatabad, Secunderabad, Serilingampally and Kukatpally) having large number of urban farming practitioners was selected purposively. 120 urban farming practitioners having more than three years experience was selected from above six zones randomly at the rate of 20 respondents from each zone. The data were collected by a personal interview method with the help of structured interview schedule and data was analyzed by employing suitable statistical methods. The findings of the study revealed that, majority of the respondents (58.33%) had medium perception level, followed by high (21.67%), and low (20.00%) level of perception about urban farming. Correlation analysis between perception and profile of the urbanites revealed that there was a positive and significant relationship between perception and independent variables viz., education and family support. Whereas, the variables namely, preference of crops, cropping intensity and innovativeness had a significant correlation with perception about urban farming. A negative and non-significant relationship was observed between perception and age, experience in urban farming and annual income.