A Comprehensive Study on Private Extension Service Availing Farmers in Tarai Region of Uttarakhand

The primary goal of most governments is to reduce investment in agricultural extension while maintaining food security. India is also reducing its public investment in agricultural extension. Public sector has been criticized for its insufficient and irrelevant activities and government failures were attributed to bureaucratic inefficiencies and poor formulation and/or implementation of extension programmes, as a result of which under financing of the activities started. Certain extension information has the limitation of being available to a selected farming group due to inaccessibility of factors like fertilizer, machines etc., to the entire farming group.

Public extension system created void between demand and supply side of services/goods. So in order to fill the gap created by public extension system and to act as alternative or supplementary or complementary to Public Extension System there existed Privatized Extension System. This was an attempt to study various social, personal, economical, situational and communicational characteristics of farmers who were availing extension services/goods from Private Extension Service Providers (PESPs). A sample size of sixty was selected based on simple random sampling technique, from the list of clientele member farmers three PESPs working in the region namely, Hariyali Kisan Bazaar, e-Choupal and Tata Kisan Sansar.

It was found that the majority of the respondents who were availing extension services from PESPs were large farmers having more than ten acres of land. This implies that only large farmers were the major clientele of PESPs. The media ownership pattern of present study revealed a good sign of proliferation of electronic media along with traditional media in farming community, especially television. Further, it was also found that private extension service utilizing farmers were exposed to and using modern mass media for seeking farm related information. The present study also revealed that respondents were not completely dependent on PESPs for all type of information. This implies that that public extension system was still perceived to be a reliable source of information. PESPs can act as supplementary or complementary to public extension system and cannot substitute the public extension system completely.