Funding and Delivering Agricultural Extension in India

Abstract

The number and types of organizations providing extension services in India have shown an increase over the last two decades. The Department of Agriculture (DoA) continues to dominate extension. The DoA has been facing a number of constraints and without a total restructuring, its ability to provide services demanded by farmers is under serious doubt. The performance of private extension agents varies widely and their presence is more skewed towards well-endowed regions. A good number of farmers are willing and able to pay for quality services especially in the area of plant protection and training programs. With the changing nature of Indian agriculture, the institutional diversity in provision of extension services would increase in coming years. Public sector extension needs to make conscious efforts to learn from ongoing institutional experiments and should be restructured with the necessary skills and capacities to integrate information and expertise available in different organizations. Introduction Extension has been traditionally funded, managed, and delivered by the public sector all over the world. The public sector monopoly came under increasing threat in the 1980s as many professionals started questioning the desirability of this situation on economic and efficiency grounds. Increasing restraints on government finances and emergence of new extension arrangements offered by the private and voluntary sectors (e.g., input companies, NGOs, farmers associations, agro-processing, etc) have accelerated the process of limiting the role of government in extension. Decentralization, cost sharing, cost recovery, withdrawal from selected services, and contracting are some of the options exercised by various governments in privatizing extension services. Privatizing extension, as one strategy for providing efficient services to farmers, is finding acceptance in developing countries, including India. A search for alternative funding and delivering mechanisms is currently on and a decision on how far India should pursue this strategy would depend on the type and quality of services made available by various agencies at present, especially those in private sector, and in the near future, the information needs of farmers and farmers willingness to pay for extension services. This paper reviews the evolution of the Indian extension system, and discusses its