Role of Education in Small Farmer's Empowerment in India

Abstract

Indian agriculture is predominantly a small holder's economy as characterised by small, fragmented and uneconomical land holdings. Their livelihood fully depends on agriculture. There are many issues and challenges for small holding agriculture in India as small farmers lack all types of resources, i.e. natural, financial as well as human resources. Small and marginal farmers particularly women, have low literacy level and lack of education leads to low levels of awareness regarding the farm technologies and their usages, institutional credit sources and schemes, bio-fertilisers, minimum support prices and the various government's support initiatives. Lack of awareness not only reduces farmers productivity but also destroy the effectiveness of the government policies, like in the case of rural credit as apart from the issues of access of rural credit to small farmers, literate farmers only have the ability to execute the amount of loans rationally because without knowledge, even if a farmer easily gets a loan under the theme of financial inclusion, he cannot be able to handle or rationally use the given amount of that loan causes not only loss of money but a destruction of scarce financial resources in the hands of farmers and failure of government policies. The result is that, there will be no effect on agricultural growth or improvements in small holder's agriculture on the one hand and destruction of government's financial viability on the other hand. While, there are many complex factors that influence sustainable development and food security, it is awareness among small and marginal farmers that can play an important role in their empowerment. Against this background, this paper aims to evaluate relationship between education and small farm holder's sustainability. The main focus of this paper is to analyse the effect of imparting education and making them aware towards the government policies, productive inputs and diversified opportunities of present scenario and provide them a level playing field in the global market.