EXPLORING THE STATUS, PROSPECTS AND CONSTRAINTS OFRIVERBED CULTIVATION IN COOCH BEHAR DISTRICT OF WESTBENGAL, INDIAPintu Das, Subhrajyoti Panda, Satarupa Modak, Litan Das, Shruti Mohapatra, Ranjit Chartejee, Sabita Mondal, Golam Torab Ali, Shrabantika Ghosh and P.K. PalAbstract Riverbed farming is a sustainable, productivity-enhancing technology suitable for dissemination in otherappropriate areas. It has been shown to be economically viable, environmentally sustainable, sociallyacceptable and technologically appropriate for landless and land-poor farmers in the Terai region. Thestudy was conducted on five villages from three riverbed systems with 20 respondents from each villagethereby totaling number of 100 respondents. The data were collected on information about riverbedcultivation, marketing of riverbed products, prospects of riverbed cultivation and constraints of riverbedcultivation. The results shows that 100% respondents give first rank to proper utilization of riverbed landfor adopting riverbed cultivation and 100% accept that they have used income from riverbed cultivation tosetup other occupations. It was also shown that most of the farmers sell their produce through middlemenfrom the farm that was 75% in Singimari river bed system followed by 65% in Torsha and 60% in Shiltorsharespectively and transportation was the most important constraint having mean value 2.83. |