Access to Pluralistic Extension Services in Cooch Behar District of West Bengal, India

The changing economic scenario in India and the need for appropriate agricultural technologies and agro-management practices to respond to food and nutritional security, poverty alleviation, diversifying market demands, export opportunities and environmental concerns is posing new challenges to technology dissemination systems. To face these challenges there is need of appropriate mix of public and private funding and delivery mechanism known as pluralistic extension system. The present study tried to explore the existing extension mechanism in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal, India and level of their access by the farmers. The district is having ATMA as well as KVK along with different other public and private channels for offering services to the farmers. 200 farmers from different blocks were selected for the study. Study revealed that farmers’ organization has highest access followed by private & corporate extension agents and general development departments. Significant difference was found in the classes of Castes on access to the services of government based agriculture and allied development departments, autonomous extension (viz. SAU & KVK) and NGO and more income raised the access