A critic of state extension service part 2

In the first part of this topic which appeared in Volume XXXIII No. 3, December 2015 we critically examined the state of agricultural education, research and extension in India. To best of our knowledge we do not think that anyone in the country and developing world thought that way. We all have taken for granted that what Americans have prescribed that is the only way to develop our farming system. This approach has miserably failed. The tragedy of the situation is that on one hand our villages are being wiped out due to extensive Urbanization and Industrialization on the other hand, the life of farming community is increasingly being made miserable due to fragmentation of holdings, climatic change and chemicalization. In the American society, farming is a occupation of hardly 2% of the population. Since they have abundant Land Mass and Scares Labor, therefore, they keep on developing Mechanized practices with only objective of Profit Maximization. In our case farming is a way of life and village is a Holistic settlement where farmers, artisans, craftsmen and landless laborers live together and share socio-economic and religio-cultural life. This has no match with any rural society of the world. Therefore, any attempt to Copy-Paste will be devastating. It will be wise to remember that in India, political changes take place on the price of Onion and Pulses. Does this happen anywhere in the political history of the world? The answer will be no. Gandhi knew the answer. Thanks to the copy cat politicians, his ideas were thrown in the waste paper basket. The premise of this paper is based on Gandhian Philosophy of Save Village Save India. In his approach Man is the Supreme, not the Produce. However, it does not mean that we are against increasing food production but we are treating the man responsible for production as our top concern in our approach. Our conviction is if villages are wiped out, Indian Civilization will also vanish. We clearly explained it in our earlier presentation. Keeping this basic frame work in our focus, we will here after deliberate the process by which we can achieve our goal of improving the quality of life of farmers and rural communities better from what it is today. Hence, we have proposed State Rural University System (SRUS). A structural diagram of it has been presented in figure 7 in the last paper. It may be noticed that we have not rejected the basic concept of Agricultural Universities of India, rather we have built our design over the same with significant differences in entire approach of Education, Research and Community Education (earlier extension education).