Agricultural Extension Education

What Agricultural Extension Education is

Agricultural Extension Education is the applied social science of carrying useful, research-based knowledge to rural people and helping them use it in their own fields and households. It is education that happens outside a classroom: voluntary, built on what the learner already needs, and judged by whether behaviour actually changed.

The discipline sits between agricultural science and the social sciences. An extension professional has to understand the technology, and also the communication, psychology, sociology and management that decide whether the technology is ever taken up. That is why the ASRB syllabus for this subject ranges from Rogers' diffusion of innovations to sampling theory to gender analysis frameworks.

Principles the subject rests on

• Principle of interest and need. Extension starts from the felt needs of the people, not from what the department wishes to promote.
• Principle of participation. People learn by doing and accept what they helped decide.
• Principle of cultural difference. The programme adapts to the local culture, not the other way round.
• Principle of the grass roots. Work begins with existing local groups and local leaders.
• Principle of adaptability. Methods change with the audience, the season and the situation.
• Principle of the whole family. The household, not only the male cultivator, is the unit of change.
• Principle of evaluation. A programme that is never measured cannot be improved.

Objectives and scope

The stated objective of extension is to raise the standard of living of rural families through improvements in farming, home-making and community life, using their own resources. In practice this splits into changing knowledge, changing skills and changing attitude, in that order of difficulty.

The scope has widened well beyond crop production. Contemporary Agricultural Extension covers ICT-based advisory, market-led extension and value chains, farmer producer organisations, climate-resilient agriculture, entrepreneurship, and gender mainstreaming, alongside the classical work on teaching methods and programme planning.

How the subject is examined

For ASRB NET, ARS, SMS and STO, Agricultural Extension Education is organised into ten units. The Preliminary paper is objective; the ARS and SMS Mains is descriptive. The full breakdown, marking scheme and eligibility are on the ASRB Extension syllabus page.

• Unit 1: Fundamentals of Extension Education & Communication
• Unit 2: Extension Methods & Agricultural Journalism
• Unit 3: Information Communication Technologies
• Unit 4: Training & Human Resource Development
• Unit 5: Research Methodology in Extension Education
• Unit 6: Programme Planning, Evaluation & Impact Assessment
• Unit 7: Extension Management & Organizational Behaviour
• Unit 8: Entrepreneurial Development
• Unit 9: Agricultural Innovation System & Extension Approaches
• Unit 10: Gender Sensitization & Empowerment

Common questions