This chapter examines the current state of agricultural extension reforms and their linkages to the agricultural research system reforms in India and identifies the policy options and strategic priorities for making it relevant, responsive, and efficient. It explores how the National Agriculture Research Systems (NARS) responded with its own set of reforms that were sought to increase its relevance and its linkages to the extension system reforms.
This chapter analyses the access to and adequacy of formal sources in meeting the credit needs, particularly agricultural credit needs, of small farmers in India with the help of banking data, and data on the borrowing profiles of these households collected through the village surveys of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI).Three major institutions provide formal credit in the rural areas of India today: commercial banks, regional rural banks (RRBs), and credit cooperatives.
The development community has shown increasing interest in the potential of innovation systems and value chain development approaches for reducing poverty and stimulating greater gender equity in rural areas. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of systematic knowledge on how such approaches have been implemented in different contexts, the main challenges in their application, and how they can be scaled to enable large numbers of poor people to benefit from participation in value chains.
Market access determines the income of agricultural households and incentivizes the cultivation of diverse crops. Markets in India are mostly unorganized with limited infrastructure limiting their ability to cater to quality requirements and specifications demanded by urban consumers. Therefore, parallel to traditional markets, direct linkages with farms and alternative markets based on electronic sales platforms, new commodity futures and warehousing systems are needed.
Accordingly to the authors It is beyond the scope of this chapter to empirically explore the determinants of the commercialization of agriculture and its impact on poverty; so instead, they will present and discuss some empirical evidence on topics that remain hotly debated regarding commercialization and poverty. In Sect. 12.2, it is investigated how smallholder farmers in northern Vietnam have been affected by the recent food price volatility with respect to their income and consumption levels, while in Sect.