Published Paper Details:

The present study has been conducted in Solan and Una district of Himachal Pradesh. The areas have been selected purposely for the empirical verification because while district Una falls in low altitude where as, district Solan falls in the mid altitude of Himachal Pradesh. There are five development blocks in Una district (Una, Amb, Gagret, Haroli and Bangana) and five development blocks in Solan district (Dharmpur, Kandaghat, Nalagarh, Solan and Kunihar). All the ten blocks of the two panchayats have been selected for the study. A list of villages has been arranged in an ascending order on the basis of their respective population and one village from each development blocks are selected randomly. The size of holdings considered viz. marginal (0-1 hectares), small (1-2 hectares), medium (2-4 hectares) and large size of holding (about 4 hectare area). 404 households are selected randomly in the study area. Agriculture is the main occupation adopted by 72.66 per cent marginal 75.86 per cent small and 70.67 per cent medium farmers and 71.08 per cent large. The maximum number of cash crop growers belong to the general category i.e. 38.57 per cent marginal, 35.04 per cent small and 38.60 per cent medium and 40.0 per cent. The sex ratio has been defined as the number of females per thousand males in the population. The sex-ratio among the all sample households has been worked out 966 females per thousand males.