education is better than agriculture coment
Answers
begin nearly every program I lead with the same question. “What is agriculture?” I’ve heard MANY answers over the years, but the most unique and humorous response came while doing a summer program at an elementary school in Des Moines a few weeks ago. After asking “What is agriculture?” a third-grade boy raised his hand with utmost excitement and said, “It’s when you look up at the stars with a telephone!” He was thinking of a big word that starts with A, but not the one I had in mind.
While this example is funny, his understanding of agriculture was similar to most upper elementary and even older students I encounter. Other very common answers are “nature” or something involving “cultures.”
Usually someone in the group eventually says farming, but with a few follow up questions I discover that most don’t realize what farmers do, and that there are a lot of other good jobs in agriculture, besides the job of a farmer.
Introduction:
Agricultural education is the teaching of agriculture, natural resources, and land management.
The Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) is the apex body for agriculture education, research and farm extension in India.
Need for agriculture education:
Education increases knowledge or information and it increases farmer’s capacity to learn.
As the farmer becomes better educated, new ideas from outside hit them more often and they are more likely to understand, appreciate and adopt them.
As the level of agricultural education increases, farmers will become more and more self-reliant and will depend more on their self studies of the literatures dealing with farming and less on personal help from the extension personnel’s.
The Role of ICAR:
Up to 1966, the council could play a very limited role in the development of agricultural education in the country because it had neither adequate financial resources to support the development programme of agricultural and veterinary colleges nor the statutory authority to enforce the standard of education.
The ICAR was recognized in 1966 as an autonomous society with full-fledged division of agricultural education.
It was established to provide the necessary leadership and support to accelerate the pace of development of agricultural education in the country.
In 1977 Council appointed high level review committee known as Randhawa Committee, to assess the progress of agricultural universities and submitted its report in 1978.
The problems plaguing ICAR are listed below:
ICAR recruitment’s are manipulated and have a high degree of nepotism and lack of accountability.
Although women farmers account for more than 50% of the agriculture workforce in India, women recruitment to ICAR found wanting for more
There is no inter departmental coordination between agricultural universities and institutes in India
Sometimes the research work done by ICAR is getting stolen by the private companies resulting in both intellectual property loss and monetary loss preventing the institutions to tread on a path of self financing.
ICAR have strong bias towards crop sciences at the cost of animal husbandry neglecting the importance of animals in making the farmer self sustainable.
The reforms needed to ICAR to make it more productive are:
ICAR should be given autonomous status and should report directly to the prime minister.
Its functions should be limited to farm research and education and oversight over non-ICAR institutions and farm extension should be left to state government
In the view of climate change and global warming more research should be done on climate resilient farming.