Rooftop Gardening: Estimation of Income from a Score of Socio-Ecological Variables

Aims: To study the relationship of total income was incurred from the rooftop gardening with various socio economic and behavioural aspects and elicit the future opportunity for this innovative method in this global warming situation where the world is facing the increasing crisis of availability of the land resources, support sustainability, contamination of ground water, food accessibility, and economic sustainability.

Study Design: The locale was selected by purposive sampling technique and the respondents following rooftop gardening had been interacted and was selected by the snowball sampling method.

Place and Duration of Study: The study was carried out during 2017 and 2018. The place, Janai Road of Srirampur, Khanakul-I and Khanakul-II block of Hooghly district, Budge Budge-II, Bishnupur-I and Bishnupur-II of South 24 Parganas and various areas in Kolkata were selected for the study.

Methodology: In this present study 50 respondents following rooftop gardens have been interacted and are selected by the snowball sampling method. A semi-structured schedule has been administered to generate women information regarding family composition, the rationale for opting rooftop gardening, the ecological views on roof gardening, and the cost opportunity analysis. The gathered data had been put into multivariate analysis (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences V20.0 (SPSS) of IBM was used for analyzing the Coefficient of Correlation, Stepwise Regression and Path Analysis).

Results: Education (X2), rooftop area (X4), diversity of plants (X6), labour charges (X8), organic manure (X11), fertilizer (X13) variables have been found to exert strong and determining contribution to total income. Respondents revealed that it had provided a certain amount of income in addition to the conventional farming income.

Conclusion: The study had revealed that Rooftop gardening is not only eco-friendly horticulture but also a successful enterprise, having all the three critical echelons viz. economy, ecology, and equity as well.