No abstract

Youths constitute a formidable force in the agricultural production process, constituting a sizeable proportion of the workforce especially in the rural areas. The study was conducted to find out the relationship between socio-economic characteristics of youth of fisher communities and their attitude towards fishing occupation district Bandipora of Jammu and Kashmir. Simple random sampling technique was adopted to select 120 respondents from the 4 selected villages. Data were collected using structured pretested interview schedule among the respondents. Correlation analysis was carried out to analyze the relationship between socio-economic attributes and the attitude of youth towards fishing occupation using SPSS software. Results revealed that among the socio-economic characteristics age, marital status, educational qualification, family type, household earners and investment on fishing inputs had exhibited negative and significant correlation (r= -0.376 to -0.787, p= 0.05) with the attitude of youth towards fishing occupation while the variables like active fishing days and income through fishing in summer have shown positively significant correlation (r= 0.183 to 0.845, p= 0.05). Other characteristics such as residential background, house type, number of dependents, household expenditure, income through fishing in winter, marketing channels and opted alternate source had nonsignificant correlation (r= -0.004 to 0.173, p= 0.05) with the attitude of youths towards fishing occupation. The need to provide social amenities and infrastructures that will make the youths live and work in the rural areas is emphasized. The findings will help extension policy makers to frame appropriate training programmes for educating youth regarding opportunities in fishery and allied sectors.