MANAGE-University Alliance for Advancing Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services
(Concept Note, 2017)
Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services (AEAS) in India started in a major institutional form with the Green Revolution in the 1960s with a focus on increasing agricultural production, taking the country out of the clutches of frequent famine threats and becoming self-sufficient in food grain production. AEAS concentrated mostly on Transfer of Technology (ToT). While the Green revolution was successful in increasing production of rice and wheat in a few irrigated areas in the country, more complex challenges came to view with time.
Extension is evolving: The concept of AEAS also changed to collaborative, bottom-up development rather than mere ToT. With the gradual entry of the private sector in AEAS, it further moved to the concept of innovation, incubation, and start-ups in agriculture, promoting farming more as a business model for developed farmers rather than a mere act of subsistence. New challenges like climate change, nutrition security, natural resource management (NRM), and so on, and the response to them have changed the dynamics of AEAS in the recent times.
Curriculum mismatch: While response to the challenges are, to some extent, coming from the policy sector, mismatch between the university curricula and innovations in the field are widening gradually. The university curricula, as of now, are not equipped to integrate the ever-changing field-level developments and innovations – be it challenges or response to those – and so a large gap is being created in imparting the required soft skills, functional skills and specialised skills to the students of extension education to equip them to effectively deal with field problems.
Research is less relevant: Research at the university level comprises mostly of Master’s and Doctoral students’ research, which does not contribute much for policy making. Evidence-based policy advocacy requires thorough understanding of the current gaps in agricultural extension and designing research to address those in effective ways. The current research being carried out is, in most cases, a repetition of studies already conducted, which does not help in contributing to either advancement of knowledge and theory or practice of extension.
Siloed, undocumented frontline extension efforts: Another major contribution of universities was frontline demonstration, which is also past its golden years. While universities still engage in frontline extension, there is no proper documentation of the activities and so, many good practices are confined to a small area and are eventually lost without scaling up. Efforts to share the experiences, technologies and innovations of university frontline AEAS have also been negligible in recent years.
MANAGE – Proposing an alliance: MANAGE is a premiere institute of the country engaged in capacity development activities; management education; knowledge management; and policy research and advocacy. It implements central sector schemes like Agri Clinics and Agri-Business Centres (ACABC), Diploma in Agricultural Extension Services for Input Dealers (DAESI) Programme, etc., promoting both public and private extension and is involved in the entire gamut, from policy advocacy to implementation. Considering its wide reach in India and other Asian and African countries and expertise in AEAS, MANAGE is interested to form an alliance with universities across the country for advancement of extension.
MANAGE is interested in forming a Consortium for Development Dialogue on AEAS for revamping existing curricula in extension education, identifying major thrust areas for extension research leading to evidence-based policy suggestions, increasing research competence through good practices workshops, documenting field innovations and communicating them to suitable stakeholders, and formulating field extension models and sharing the best fit models. These multitude of activities will help faculty members, researchers and other stakeholders keep abreast with the recent developments in extension, increase quality of research, and amp up the extension activities of universities.
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