Agricultural Extension System in Bihar, India: An Overview

Agricultural extension system plays a crucial role in increasing agricultural productivity and farm income, strengthening food security, improving rural livelihoods, and promoting agriculture as an engine of rural economic growth. In India, a Central Department of Agriculture was established after the Orissa famine during 1866. Department of Agriculture in Bihar was established in 1912 after separation of Bihar from Bengal. After independence, several programmes like IADP, IAAP, HYVP etc were implemented in Bihar, which fetched good results. Later on, Training and Visit approach of extension was also implemented which was subsequently replaced by NATP. Currently, pluralistic extension services in Bihar is prevailing which includes central and state Government agencies, ICAR, KVKs, SAUs, NGOs and private sector organizations. Despite all the efforts, transfer of technology programmes are yet to achieve desired success. Duplication of extension services is being observed as many agencies work in same set of selected villages. Recently, using Agriculture Road Map of Bihar, Government has launched several agricultural development programmes for transfer of modern agricultural technology, which may likely to improve access of farmers to modern agricultural technology. To make extension more pragmatic, some of the activities including supply of quality inputs and market linkage of the produce should be the part of core extension programme.