Enhancing Agricultural Extension Services for Rural Development

Agricultural extension is one of the most significant agencies for rural development. Although the term "Extension" is often connected with the agricultural and rural development, it is a non formal educational role that applies in various institutions and disseminates information and guidance to enhance knowledge, attitudes, skills and aspirations.

- DR. BANARSI LAL

Agricultural extension is an efficient and systematic process that helps rural farmers to help themselves by informing them and improving their knowledge, attitude and skills on how to increase their production in terms of applying useful information and technologies in their farming practices. Moreover, extension personnel's work with the farmers to convince them to adopt the technologies through the managed extension programmes. Agricultural extension has played a significant role in achieving increasing crops yields through green revolution. Agricultural extension is known to offer technical guidance, provide information, transfer new technologies, help farmers to determine their problems and unify themselves into the farmers groups. Extension and research are the cardinal pillars of agricultural development of any nation. Agricultural extension as a profession has completed more than five decades of its existence. Substantial contribution has been made by this profession for the development of farmers. In order to get the true potential, the country need to go a long way to meet the challenges to increase the agricultural and animal production from the available resources, keeping in mind the ecological and environmental sustainability. There is need to tune our technology transfer system in line with the national and international level. Farmer is backed with many sources of extension services. The extension services are provided to the farmers by the government institutes, directorates, research centers, input companies, NGOs, agro-processors, cooperatives etc. The agricultural extension and supported extension services are unique in structure and function. Interestingly, agricultural extension is not restricted to single fixed programme rather it adjusts according to the changing needs of the society. Now the time has come to assess as to how the effectiveness of this profession could be increased to achieve our cherished goal of developing agriculture. To