THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERTS’ VIEW TOWARDS THE USE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IN EXTENSION SERVICES IN NER INDIA

The development of agriculture plays a prominent role in a nation's economy, more so in the case of developing countries of the world. In India, agriculture is considered the backbone of the economy. Given the diversity of agro-ecological conditions across the country and the wide range of producers (small, and medium, large), the Indian agricultural enterprise is inevitably faced with a great diversity of needs, opportunities and prospects. With information being identified as a crucial component of the agricultural value chain, there is an urgent need to devise strategies which will enable improved access to such information as well as facilitate the exchange of information between stakeholders. Many impact evaluation studies reveal that the public-sector extension services despite using a variety of extension programs have not seen much success because they lack technological integration. Studies show that agricultural productivity is considerably influenced by human capital consisting of agricultural and rural extension programs. Thus there needs to be increased emphasis on involving all the stakeholders such as policy makers, educators, scientists, extension personnel in research, development and technology transfer activities and regular training of educators/researchers/extension personnel in SAUs and officers of the agricultural development departments in the use of ICTs. In this regard there is a need to probe into the factors that influence the current usage pattern of ICT among the educators and scientists involved in extension. This research paper makes an attempt to study the same. This study is concentrated in the North-eastern region (NER) of India as the region reportedly lags behind in technology implementation and adoption by farmers. 100 agricultural professionals involved in agricultural extension activities from the 8 states of NER were a part of this study that threw light on factors influencing the use of ICT in the workplace.