Lab to land: Addressing Indian agriculture’s weakest link — Extension

Lab to land: Addressing Indian agriculture’s weakest link — Extension

News:

Article discuss about significance of agriculture extension to enhance income from farming sector.

Important Facts:

Issues with planning and implementation of agriculture development programs:

• The earlier mechanism of planning and implementation of agriculture and allied development programmes was centralized in nature.
• The approach was top-down which focused on individual commodities & enterprises rather than on an integrated approach.
• The farmers were considered as mere receivers of benefits rather than as persons responsible to influence the planning process.

What is Agriculture Extension:

• Agriculture extension viewed as an educational programme to be undertaken by public agencies to activate the process of transferring knowledge, science and technology from laboratories to people or farmer and to help them in farm planning, decision making, record keeping, use of inputs, storage, processing and marketing, ensure supplies and services, increase their production, develop people and their leaders, improve their occupation, family, and community life
• Agriculture extension is about dissemination of this critical gap-filling knowledge and information, which, in the 1970s and 1980s, was done by the so-called Training and Visit (T&V) workers. However, it collapsed in the early 1990s.
• The collapse of extension services subsequently led to creation of a district-level Agriculture Technology Management Agency or ATMA system.

Extension services are classified into 4 types:

• Technology transfer (persuasive + paternalistic) – the traditional model of the transfer of advice, knowledge and information in a linear manner;
• Advisory (persuasive + participatory) – the use by farmers of a cadre of experts as a source of advice in relation to specific problems faced by them;
• Facilitation (educational + participatory)– the aim of this model is to help farmers to define their own problems and develop their own solutions.
• Human resource development (educational + paternalistic): This paradigm dominated the earliest days of extension in Europe and North America, when universities gave training to rural people who were too poor to attend full-time courses

About ATMA:

• The ATMA programme provides for undertaking innovative extension activities by States
• The new model seeks to Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA) framework in each district is mandated to develop a demand driven & situation specific Strategic Research and Extension Plan (SREP) involving all the stakeholders.
• However, its functioning has been far from satisfactory.

The Million Farmers’ School” (TMFS) Initiative:

• To encourage the use of modern farming techniques, Government in Uttar Pradesh started “The million farmers school”
• Under this initiative more than 10 lakh farmers of the state will be trained to imparted training pertaining to modern farming techniques at the million farmers school, so that they can not only improve the production and productivity of crops, but eventually are able to increase their income.
• Farmer school, was not a new concept. There are such schools organised under ATMA in farmers’ fields. But they haven’t been a success.
• However, TFMS has been designed differently. It has introduced three new elements — rigorous training of staff to make them function as proper trainers, structured training modules for farmers, and organisation of ‘kisan pathshalas’ (farmer schools) in a campaign mode.
• The pathshalas were conducted in government primary/junior school buildings accessible to a cluster of villages to provide demonstrations on seed treatment, germination test, recognition of adulteration in fertilisers and pesticides etc.
• With the help of The National Informatics Centre infrastructure, interaction between scientist and farmers were made possible through video conferencing.

Benefits of TMFS:

• It helped into disseminating knowledge and information about scientific farming and government schemes.
• It also acted as a powerful tool for capacity building for officers and staff working in agriculture extension services.
• Imparting knowledge to farmers about spraying the right kind and quantity of pesticides and fertilisers that is crop-specific and soil health card-based, to the best varieties/hybrids of seeds suited for their agro-climatic zones and the ideal time of sowing.
• This proved to be a low-cost and high-returns programme, which has even helped re-establish contact between farmers and the department.
• Better uptake of government schemes is the substantial increase in subsidised seed sales from state-owned/cooperative stores.