Nature of Variations in Managing Information by Fish Farmers: A Case Study from West Tripura District, India

The present study was undertaken to analyze the information management behaviour of fish farmers in West Tripura, Tripura. An ex-post-facto research design was followed for the study and West Tripura district was purposively selected based on the prevalence of fish farmers in the district. A sample of 80 fish farmers were selected randomly from the eight selected villages from four blocks of the district. A structured interview schedule was used to collect the information through personal interview. The results showed that majority of the respondents belonged to medium category (62.50%) of information management behaviour, followed by low (21.25%) and high (16.25%) categories. A positive and significant relationship was observed between information management behaviour of fish farmers with independent variables i.e., education, annual income, experience in fisheries, extension contact, achievement motivation, economic motivation, information source exposure, credibility of information source and training exposure.

Tripura is a north eastern hilly state of India bordered by Assam and Mizoram to the east and Bangladesh to the north, south, and west. The state comprises of eight districts viz., Dhalai, Khowai, Shipahijala, Gomati, Unakoti, North Tripura, South Tripura and West Tripura. The state has a total water area of 3, 32,17.46 ha of which West Tripura contributes 3,400.14 ha. In the year 2013-14, Tripura produced about 6, 21,259.10 MT of fish whereas West Tripura's production was 6,390.99 MT which was about 10.43% of the total production in the state (Anonymous 2014). Fishery plays a very important role in the state not only for food but also for improvement of the socio-economic condition of the rural people who are living below the poverty line. Fish is one of the most important daily diets of 95 per cent of its population with its annual per capita consumption being the highest amongst the inland states of the country (Singh et al. 2016). Tripura needs judicious exploitation of its resources to mitigate the AGRICULTURAL ZOOLOGY AND ENTOMOLOGY Print ISSN : 1974ISSN : -1712 Online ISSN : 2230-732X  Meena et al. (2014) in her study also found that knowledge, education, mass media exposure and land holding were very imperative variables for minimizing adoption gap. Thus, the technology dissemination system must be geared up to organize campaigns, field days, demonstrations, exhibitions, kisan gosthi, kisan mela, discussions with farmers, etc. so that farmers could acquire latest knowledge, that can lead to reduction in adoption gap in relation to feeding practices of dairy animals. There has been information explosion around the globe and our fish farmers have to keep pace with the latest development which creates a situation wherein fish farmers are unable to understand and cope up with the vast amount of information available. There is a huge gap between those who use ideas and those who produce them; a good technique of information management will certainly mitigate this problem. The information management behaviour has been conceptualized as a composite measure of information seeking, evaluation and preservation behaviour of the individual fish farmer. Thus, present study was conducted to study the information management behaviour of the fish farmers in West Tripura.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The study was conducted in West Tripura (23.8997° N, 91.4048° E) district of Tripura in the year 2017-2018. The district stood highest in the numbe r of fish farmers with vast fishery resources (Debnath et al. 2013 .3722° E) and two villages were purposively selected from each block based on the population of fish farmers. From each village, 10 fish farmers were randomly selected for the sampling. Thus, a total of 80 fish farmers were selected from the villages for the study. In the context of the present paper, the information management behaviour (IMB) was operationally defined as the activities performed by an individual fish farmer for seeking, evaluation and preservation of (scientific) information with regard to the improved fish farming practices. There are three dimensions of information management behaviour (IMB) which are stated as below.
Information seeking behaviour: The Information seeking behaviour refers to the activities performed by an individual fish farmer in relation to acquisition of scientific information with regard to the improved fish farming practices from various information sources. The procedure suggested by Saha and Devi (2014) with little modification was followed for measuring information seeking behaviour of the respondents. Based on the available literature and discussion with extension functionaries/ experts, all possible information sources were exhaustively listed under different headings viz., individual contact, group contact and mass contact. The frequency of contact of different information sources was measured on a four point continuum: 'Regularly', 'Occasionally', 'Rarely' and 'Not at all' with a scoring of 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively.

Information evaluation behaviour:
After having received information from various sources, the fish farmers may evaluate their worthiness based on the past experience as well as the applicability and appropriateness in the existing situation. Information evaluation behaviour was measured in terms of 8 different acts which were likely to be performed by the individual for the evaluation of the information and consequent acceptance of information. Each act performed by an individual was assigned a numerical score. Thus, the theoretical information evaluation score of an individual ranged between 0 to 8.

Information storage/preservation behaviour:
After evaluation of the scientific farm information by the fish farmers, they may storage or preserve them for future use. The information preservation behaviour of the farmers has been operationally defined as the activities performed by an individual fish farmer for storage/preservation of the received practices of fish farming for future reference. Thus, the theoretical information preservation score of an individual ranged between 0 to 6. The scores of all the items were summed up to obtain the information preservation behaviour of an individual respondent. This was quantified by using the scale used by Saha and Devi (2014). The information management behaviour of the respondent was the sum of the entire three dimensions viz., information seeking, evaluation and preservation behaviour as given below:

Analytical Tools
I. Frequency and percentage: While the frequency (or absolute frequency) of an event is the number of times the event occurred in an experiment or study, percentage is a fraction expressed with 100 as its denominator. It was used to any set of data for comparison.

II. Arithmetic mean:
It is defined as the sum of all values of the observation divided by the total number of observations. Symbolically, it is represented as,

III. Standard deviation:
Standard deviation is the square root of the arithmetic mean of the square of all deviations, the deviations being measured from the arithmetic mean of the distribution. It is commonly denoted by the symbol σ (sigma). It is less affected by sampling errors and is a more stable measure of dispersion. The standard deviation of the data grouped in the form of a frequency distribution is computed by the formula. IV. Ranking: Ranking, as an expression of respondents' assigned priority about their feeling against a set of structured questions/statements, was utilized in the present study for classifying the responses in order of perceived importance and also for preparing an order of the observed data emanated from the study.

V. Spearman's rank correlation:
The rank correlation coefficient is the measure of correlation that exists between the two sets of ranks. In other words, it is a measure of association that is based on the ranks of the observations and not on the numerical values of the data. For calculating rank correlation coefficient, first of all the actual observation needs be replaced by their ranks, giving rank 1 to the highest value, rank 2 to the next highest value and following this very order ranks are assigned for all values. If 2 or more values happen to equal, then the average of the ranks which should have been assigned to such values had they been all different, is taken and the same rank (equal to the said average) is given to concerning values. The second step is to record the difference between ranks (or 'd') for each pair of observations, then square these difference to obtain a total of such differences which can symbolically be stated as Σdi 2 . Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, r was worked out as under: Spearman's 'r' = 1 -( )

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Distribution of respondents according to their information management behaviour depicted in Table 1 revealed that 62.50 per cent of the respondents had medium level of information management behaviour, followed by 21.25 percent and 16.25 percent of the respondents who had low and high level of information management behaviour respectively.

Information seeking behaviour of respondents:
It can be observed from Table 2 that majority of respondents (55.00 %) belonged to the medium level of information seeking behaviour followed by 27.50 per cent of the respondents who belonged to low information seeking behaviour category whereas only 17.50 percent of the respondents belonged to high Information seeking behaviour category. Information seeking pattern: The respondents were distributed as per information seeking behavioural category as depicted in Fig. 1 Information seeking behaviour among mass contact methodis also dominant in middle category through listening to agricultural/fisheries programme in radio, watching agricultural/fisheries programme in television, reading agricultural/fisheries magazine/ leaflet/booklet and participating in Agri fair/ exhibitions. Through group discussion, meeting and training programmes, fish farmers exchanged and shared information concerning to fish farming activities. Hence, they frequently sought information from the above sources which may be due to high credibility attached to these sources.
Further, it can be clearly observed from Table 3  proportion (83.75%) of the fish farmers occasionally sought information from agricultural/fisheries programme in television followed by agricultural/ fisheries magazine/leaflet/booklet (72.50%).

Information evaluation behaviour:
The information evaluation behaviour of the fish farmers presented in Table. 4 revealed that maximum (78.75%) of the respondents had medium level of information evaluation behaviour whereas only 15 per cent and 6.25 per cent of the respondents had high and low level of information evaluation behaviour respectively. The findings in Table 5 reveal that 98.75 per cent of the respondents had the habit of evaluating information through discussion with neighbours/ friends and through the acceptability of the information based on their past experience. The possible reasons for the respondents to discuss with neighbor and friends may be due to the high credibility and accessibility attached to these sources. A major proportion (93.75%) of the respondents depended on discussed with family members for evaluating the information. Eighty five per cent of the respondents considered the economic feasibility of information or technology in evaluating the information which may be due to their poor economic condition. 33.75 per cent of the respondents were found to evaluate the effectiveness of information through discussion with progressive fish farmers. Other sources for evaluation of information by sizeable proportion of respondents were through discussion with extension personnel (22.50%) and through small scale trial in their farms (8.75%). Discussion with extension personnel and conducting farm trail in small scale require continuous supervision and adequate facilities due to which relatively less number of the respondents used these sources for evaluating the effectiveness of any information.
Information storage behaviour: After the information is sought and evaluated, one is likely to preserve it for future use or reference. An attempt was made to find out the various methods of information storage/ preservation used by the fish farmers. Data collected are presented in Table  6. It is evident from the table that 100 per cent the respondents retained farm information through memorization followed by 85 per cent of the respondents who shared the information orally with family members. The respondents also retained the information by preserving newspaper cuttings (78.75%); preserving the leaflets, bulletins, booklets, etc (65%) and maintaining a diary/notes of farm information (36.25%). None of the respondents were found to preserve the information in CD, floppy or any other digital medium. The reason may be due to their ignorance and less exposure to different ICT tools for the preservation of these information. Hence, it can be inferred from the study that the majority of the fish farmers did not have systematic techniques of information storage which could end up in distortion and loss of the information sought by them.

Relationship among socio-personal, socio-economic and communicational characteristics of the fish farmers and their information management behaviour:
A close observation of results from Table 7 reveals that a positive and significant relationship was found between information management behaviour of fish farmers with their independent variables i.e., education, annual income, experience in fisheries, extension contact, achievement motivation, economic motivation, information source exposure, credibility of information source and training exposure. The finding revealed that education of the fish farmers had significant relationship with the information management behaviour since the fish farmers who were educated had an opportunity to access to the different print media and were likely to be more receptive to new ideas. Moreover, they are more likely to have frequent contacts with extension personnel thereby acquiring more farm information. The experience in fisheries activities by the fish farmers was found to be positive and highly significant with the information management behaviour which may be due to their vast exposure to different fisheries activities thereby making them easier to seek, evaluate and preserve the different farm information. Extension contact, information source exposure and credibility of information source and training exposure also showed positive and highly significant relationship with the information management behaviour. Frequent extension contact by the respondents may provide them more exposure to different farm information sources and depending on the worthiness of these sources, fish famers' perceived credibility may also differs.