Sustainable Rural Development through Agriculture

In the context of sustainable agricultural development, agricultural extension has a very crucial role to play. The tasks and responsibilities of extension service will need to be broad-based and holistic in contents and scope, thus beyond agricultural technology transfer. Its normal task of transferring and disseminating to farmers appropriate agricultural technologies and good farm practices would not be sufficient. Extension agencies, services, and workers will need to exercise a more proactive and participatory role and serve as knowledge/information “brokers”, initiating and facilitating mutually meaningful and equitable knowledge-based transactions among agricultural researchers, trainers, and primary producers. To improve its cost-effectiveness, proper strategies to advocate favourable and explicit agricultural extension policies are needed. Modern strategic planning and quality management tools and approaches should be utilized in developing or restructuring extension organizations or institutions. More innovative methods must be developed to identify systematically farmers’ problems and felt needs, and to help formulate and set agricultural research agenda based on such needs and problems. In short, there is a need to develop and improve the conceptual, technical, and operational methods and tools in order to strategically plan, efficiently manage, and scientifically evaluate a problem-solving, demand-driven and needs-based agricultural extension programmes. It is thus imperative that the body of knowledge on agricultural extension be continuously improved, updated, and disseminated. It is also important that the best practices should be shared widely among agricultural practitioners, educators and scholars. The editors have tried to take a step in this direction with the help of 54 contributors involving extension practitioners, educators, and scholars from all over the country with different educational backgrounds and working environments in improving the quality of agricultural extension and in generating new ideas and methods for sustainable rural development.