Abstract
Extensive services to agriculture are continuously evolving in less-developed economies like India. With a focus on productivity and farmers’ livelihood improvement, Indian agriculture sector has witness a wide range of reforms in past decades. However, the unsustainable, fragmented and decentralized approach has attracted nationwide debate and criticism about the effectiveness of these reforms. In this study, empirically at the micro level, we investigated the impact of the government reforms and initiatives to address current challenges of agricultural extension services in India. We firstly identified the gap between the required demand of small and marginalized farmers from the public extension services and the services supplied to them. Further, based on the identified supply-demand interface, we develop the performance measurement metrics to derive the famers’ satisfaction level. This study considered many factors which may be predictors of farmers’ requirement from the extension providers. We attempted to understand the interplay of those factors using correlation and factor analysis and then using ordinal logistic regression we regressed the constructs with the farmers’ requirement indicator variable to the satisfaction level to derive package appropriateness factors. The farmers’ perception of the service parameters are then used within the model to figure out gaps in the requirement of farmers and the services being provided to them by the government organizations within Meghalaya, a State of India.
Highlights
Performance of agriculture sector depends upon its ability to cope with the contemporary challenges like rising population, changing demand pattern of food and agri product, climate change, resource scarcity and many more uncertainties
Empirically at the micro level, we investigated the impact of the government reforms and initiatives to address current challenges of agricultural extension services in India
In Indian context many researches [23] [34] [35] have studied the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) and mobile-enabled agricultural services on extension services delivery and find that mobile telephony has helped creating awareness amongst farmers
Summary
Performance of agriculture sector depends upon its ability to cope with the contemporary challenges like rising population, changing demand pattern of food and agri product, climate change, resource scarcity and many more uncertainties. Referring to the supply chain literature, a push-pull system defines the flow of a product or information between two links of a network In this context, we are referring, consumers (farmers) usually “pull” the goods or information they demand for their needs, while the suppliers (Extension worker) “push” them toward the consumers based on the expected demand. This help to identify the potential gaps and the need for change. We discuss the empirical results and the model depicting famer satisfaction This includes a thorough analysis of various issues linked with extension services from farmer side production to customer side consumption, including subsidy, cost, price fluctuation, transportation, storage, agriculture trade, etc. The last section discusses the managerial implication with the concluding remarks
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