Scouting, Documentation and Classification of Indigenous Knowledge- Theory, Concept, Methodolgy and Examples

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INTRODUCTION Green revolution with the principle of monoculture resulted in the rapid erosion of crop and livestock diversity, natural soil fertility and biological pest regulation, enhanced the soil erosion, salinization and environmental problems, reduced the nutrition once obtained from ‘wild’ foods on farms, increased the need for expensive and poisonous chemical fertilizers and pesticides and finally made the farmers more dependent on markets and outside agencies resulting in an imbalanced growth between rural and urban areas. Therefore, a section of policy makers and agricultural scientists have now understood that continuation of modern agriculture might lead to severe ecological and economic problems. They are also convinced that modern agriculture may not be able to meet the requirements of the ever-increasing population in the future. Hence, they are searching for alternative technologies. Several alternatives have been proposed such as low external input agriculture, sustainable agriculture, organic farming, biodynamic farming etc. However, they require, some times, little or considerable external inputs whose availability may be uncertain in future. Hence, for the developing countries, the other alternative viz., traditional methods have special advantages over modern agricultural techniques. Also the capital and technological skill requirements in the use of traditional technologies are generally low and their adoption often requires little restructure of the traditional societies. These traditional technologies are nothing but indigenous knowledge. By adopting such indigenous knowledge, our ancestors did not face any problem of large scale pest out break or economic crisis unlike the today’s farmers According to IIRR (1996) Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is defined as the knowledge that, the people in a given community have developed overtime, and

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