Among the indigenous draught cattle breeds of Southern India, Kangeyam and Hallikar breeds were utilized by many farmers. Rice bran, straw, oilcakes, cotton seeds were the common feed that farmers fed to the animals during the work days. The feed cost varied from Rs.100 to Rs.255/pair/day. Shoeing was done at the age of 2 years and 6 months and the cost of shoeing was Rs.250/pair. The farmers were making the animal drawn implements with local artisans and they were unaware of new implements to reduce the drudgery of work cattle, designed by the Agricultural Machinery Research Centres in...

In India, a large number of innovative initiatives in the area of ICT have been undertaken by the government, non-governmental and private sectors to take ICT to agrarian community. In spite of number of projects oriented towards the transfer of technologies through ICTs, still the acceptability and utilization of ICTs is very low in the rural areas. This created the need of investigating knowledge, benefits, level of satisfaction and constraints in utilization of ICT-Village Information Centres by dairy farmers.An attempt was caried out to evaluate the effectiveness of these initiatives...