National Agricultural Technology Programme (NATP)

 

After the WTO, there was a rapid global change in agricultural trade. There are emerging needs to radically reform the extension system to meet the above challenges. Therefore, NATP was conceived as a pilot project. It was launched in November, 1998. It was an initiative of Govt. of India with World Bank Assistance. Its purpose was to make the extension services broad based, holistic beyond agricultural technology transfer besides to consolidate earlier investments, and address specific system constraints, weakness and gaps.

 The overall objective of NATP was to revitalize the agricultural technology generation assessment, refinement and dissemination systems. It had three components. These were:

•   ICAR organization and management reforms
•   Expansion of location specific research on production system and
•   Testing of innovations in technology dissemination

The innovation in technology dissemination (ITD) component of the project aimed at addressing key constraints in technology generation, validation and dissemination by introducing new institutional models and operational reform process in selected states. The states were namely: Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa and Punjab. The project was pilot tested in four districts of above mentioned each states.

Under NATP, some institutional innovations were made in each project district. These were as follows:

1. Establishment of decentralized district level autonomous institutions named ATMA (Agricultural Technology Management Agency)
2. Establishing FIAC (Farm Information and Advisory Centre) at block level
3. stablishment of state level agricultural extension management training institutions named SAMETI (State Agricultural Extension Management and Training Institutes)
4. Evolution of state level coordination and policy making body named IDWG (Inter Departmental Working Group).

With an objective to address the expanding role of extension, certain operational reforms processes were initiated in the project districts like strategic planning, bottom up planning, promotion of farmer interest groups and farmer organization, farming system approach, decentralized decision making, farmer participation research, market led production, sequential extension interventions, cost and resource sharing, IT and communication support, public private partnership, techno managerial focus, team approach, devitalizing ongoing schemes and farmers focused and farmer accountable extension. Based on the performance of the pilot study, ATMA model is now introduced in various states of the country with the help of Govt. of India.