Agricultural Extension Agents and Challenges for Sustainable Development

Agriculture is the most important sector of Indian economy, where about 70% of its population still lives in rural areas and depends on agriculture (directly or indirectly) for livelihood and sustainability. Many government and non-government agriculture extension agents (AEA) are established in India to transfer, persuade, motivate and convince the farmers to accept and implement the technology and information. But, unfortunately, farmers are unable to harness full advantage of it and that has resulted in wide transfer-of-technology divide, which, in turn, affects their overall sustainability and livelihood. In this regard, a research study based on 141 respondents from Directorate of Agriculture Extension (DAE) in District Jammu (J&K, India) was undertaken to find out the core threats which hamper them in promoting sustainable agriculture development. The validity and reliability tools, along with analytical tools, like factor analysis (FA), were used to analyse the data. The study analysed the results using statistical techniques like factor analyses, mean and Cronbach alpha values and discussed the validity and reliability of the questionnaire and acceptance of the hypothesis using t-test. The t-value was found to be 4.16 (p = 0.000) at 95% confidence level that resulted in the acceptance of the hypothesis regarding existence of significant loss of information at various levels in the transfer of technology process (TOTP). The paper concluded by offering strategies with respect to the three variables, namely, ‘Farmers,’ ‘New Technology (NT)’ and ‘Job Satisfaction (JS)’ that would not only improve agriculture productivity but also would lead to sustainable agriculture and rural development.