Prof. A. K. Purohit
Prof. S. K. Sharma
Prof. P. N. Kalla
Abstract
Agriculture is the largest production system since the first wave of civilization. India had impressive pre-historic records of crop and animal husbandry. Despite labeling as agrarian economy, India had her share of peaks and troughs. The subsistence farming continued even after independence till a technological innovation comprising of high yielding varieties, plant protection, soil fertilization, mechanization and effective extension led to green revolution in 1960s. The momentum continued to realize rain bow revolution. Certain side effects and legacies of green revolution paved way for a new paradigm of sustainable agriculture, which strategically integrated objectives of productivity escalation with that of eco-preservation in terms health of soil, water, air and agricultural produce. The paper reviews perspectives of extension and extension education endeavours of transfer oftechnology and educating the trainers for effective extension, respectively. The efforts rendered by central and state governments for achieving the goals of rural and agricultural development have been mentioned. It has also been attempted to anticipate flagship issues before the current and future Indian agriculture. Prominent among those are issues of food security, climate change, coping mechanisms for mitigating biotic and abiotic stresses, heavy subsidies to fertilizers and potential stakes of cost effective organic manure have been discussed. While dwelling upon the knocks of converging technologies, the paper cites the logistics of anticipation of a shift or coexistence of trans-disciplinary approach along with interdisciplinary research and visualizes the needs of specially trained human resource to achieve targets of research-extension-farmer linkages. A very emphatic account of cross roads in Indian agriculture has been given with suggestions to address the aspect by SAUs. Theflagging ofissues and analysis of the perspectives have been accomplished with an attitude of exploring a balance between dichotomy of productivity acceleration and environmental health as a synergy to attain the goal of sustainable agriculture.
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