Challenges in Indian Agriculture and its Implications for Organizing Extension

India's economic security is heavily dependent on agriculture. About half of India's population is either wholly or significantly dependant for their livelihoods on some form of farm activity-be it crop agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry or fisheries. Although the Green Revolution increased production and productivity of food crops, improved food security and raised rural incomes, India still has a large poor (27.5 per cent of the population living below the poverty line based on 2004–05 data) and malnourished population.

Producers in far-flung and interior areas and those regions that are less integrated with markets still suffer from lack of access to appropriate services (credit, inputs, market, extension etc). Slackening growth in rain fed areas has also resulted in widespread rural distress. Increasing de-regulation of trade has added new challenges to Indian farmers, who are forced to compete on quality and prices on several products not only in the export market, but also in domestic markets. However, quite often only the large farmers are able to integrate their production to suit the demand cycles and quality standards and small and marginal farmers are left out of these arrangements. All these developments have led to the expansion of contract farming arrangements — most of them led by agri-business companies. Indian agriculture is essentially small farm agriculture with the majority of farmers owning less than 1 ha of land. Small and marginal farmers now constitute over 80 percent of farming households in India.

Agricultural extension services can and should play an important role in addressing many of these challenges. Perhaps, there is no agency at the ground level, other than agricultural extension services that can provide knowledge support to farmers and other intermediaries who are supporting farmers and at the same time support programme implementation. Considering the changing nature of agriculture and the evolving challenges, producers currently need a wider range of support, including organizational, marketing, technological, financial and entrepreneurial. To be successful, farmers require a wide range of knowledge from different sources and support to integrate these different bits of knowledge in their production context. So, a multi-agency Extension service is needed to meet these challenges.