Performance Measurement Model for Agriculture Extension Services for Sustainable Livelihood of the Farmers: Evidences from India

Abstract

Extensive services to agriculture are continuously evolving in less-developed economies like India. With a focus on productivity and farmers’ livelihood improvement, Indian agriculture sector has witness a wide range of reforms in past decades. However, the unsustainable, fragmented and decentralized approach has attracted nationwide debate and criticism about the effectiveness of these reforms. In this study, empirically at the micro level, we investigated the impact of the government reforms and initiatives to address current challenges of agricultural extension services in India. We firstly identified the gap between the required demand of small and marginalized farmers from the public extension services and the services supplied to them. Further, based on the identified supply-demand interface, we develop the performance measurement metrics to derive the famers’ satisfaction level. This study considered many factors which may be predictors of farmers’ requirement from the extension providers. We attempted to understand the interplay of those factors using correlation and factor analysis and then using ordinal logistic regression we regressed the constructs with the farmers’ requirement indicator variable to the satisfaction level to derive package appropriateness factors. The farmers’ perception of the service parameters are then used within the model to figure out gaps in the requirement of farmers and the services being provided to them by the government organizations within Meghalaya, a State of India.