Agricultural Extension in India: A Journey Since 1952

Kiran Yadav

(GBPUAT, Pantnagar)

 

Need for National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP)

NAIP has been envisaged for facilitating accelerated and sustainable transformation of agriculture in support of poverty alleviation and income generation through technological innovations by the public research organizations in partnership with farmer's group, the private sector, the civil society organizations and other stakeholders. The total budget being allocated under this project is approximately Rs. 1150 crores (US$250 million) out of which the World Bank would fund Rs. 920 crores (US$200 million) as credit and Government of India would fund Rs. 230 crores (US$50 million).

The Objectives of NAIP 

1. To give agricultural research and technology development system an explicit development and business perspective through innovative models. In other worlds, the agricultural research system should be able to support agriculture as business venture and also as a means of security of livelihood of the rural Indian while maintaining in science.
2. To make the National Agricultural Research System, a pluralistic system where every stakeholder has a role to play.
3. Create a well defined partnership grouped with clear common goals and understanding of sharing responsibilities and benefits.
4. Develop well tested models for application of agricultural research and technology for profitability of farming, income generation and poverty alleviation.

        The NAIP approach to knowledge management allows for the development of highly integrated approaches between agricultural research and education sectors with established extension processes such as the KVKs as well as with emerging actors in private sector extension and with organizations promoting rural information access centers (village kiosks or rural knowledge centers). The emphasis is on providing information support services to the extension personnel and farmers in a seamless fashion. This integrates digital services to generate an access and delivery system for different stakeholders in online and offline modes is at the core of this action research effort.

Services:

Over the last four years, several innovative projects have been launched in India in support of a rural knowledge movement. The IIT-Kanpur initiated a project called the Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture and Livelihoods (DEAL), which experimented with NGO hosted 'Infothelas' and with websites featuring audio blogs and special purpose icons. The DEAL project has led to the Agropedia project. IIT-Bombay has developed a state of the art , online forum for question and answer and discussion called the aAQUA that can be accessed online, offline does not require a PC if a mobile phone is available with a user. This has been tried in many locations in India and especially in Maharashtra from three years. It has been in use in many different languages in India. The KISAN-Kerala, developed by the IITM-Kerala is an advanced state of the art portal based information support system for agriculture, permitting and facilitating a host of services to be delivered using this portal in broadcast and print as well as online mode.

The history of Indian agriculture extension is witnessed that the pilot projects launched to speed up the process, actually worked and proved to be a land mark like IVLP and NATP. The NAIP is the next step in this series, in which ICT is the main component. Some of the researches done in this area are:

• aAQUA-A Multilingual Web Portal Bridging Farmers and Researchers through Multimedia.
• Cyber Extension through Information Communication and Technology.
• Capacity building of agricultural extension systems: Agricultural Knowledge Management in India
• Constraints analysis of ICT application in Agricultural and Rural Development
• Farmers' opinion about Kisan Call Centers
•  Videoconferencing: Experiments to Bridge Farmer Expert Gap
• Participatory Knowledge Management-A case of Participatory People's Media
• Web-content development and utilization in Hindi: Problems and Prospects

Some of the researches can be proposed to ensure the implementation of the project:

• Feasibility studies of the agri portal can be done
• Summative evaluation of these portals
• Utility of the content generated
• Stakeholder analysis

Conclusion:

Since independence we have been experimenting with various development programmes to develop the rural India. Theoretically no programmes were found to be ineffective. Approaches were shifted from one to other only after evaluating the weaknesses of previous one noticed while implemented. But still they failed to give expected results due to various reasons out of which lack of sincerity in implementation and misuse of funds are important. T&V, ATMA, NAIP have been introduced either after eliminating some weaknesses of previous attempts or giving due attention on some basic factors for agriculture and rural development. It is expected that the new attempts will boost the process of development and India will become a developed nation by 2020. The success of the new programmes will very much depend on how they are implemented. Otherwise one day some new approach will replace them and history will repeat again.