Can Extension service be justified by showing photographs?

The trending scene in many of presentations related to agriculture and allied sciences at national and international level is arrange for good quality photographs and justify it as extension service. Is it going to justify extension service? Thumb rule of journalism reveals that, a picture is worth thousand words. Pictures always says truth. But pictures are not everything, specially in extension activities. Yes, it has some impact on justifying the services provided, but just photos per se have lot of limitations.

The missing factor in majority of extension services is educational role of extension services. If you observe nature of extension service programmes, many/all of them run behind the numbers. Ultimately target orientation in services. Every programme/project claims that we have trained a number of training programmes, conducted so many demonstrations, organized so many field days, farmers fair etc in which so many number of people participated. Everywhere it is number game. What are the implications of these numbers we find in the reports? As per the mandate of KVKs every KVK has to organize about 100 training programmes in an year, means almost every third day there is a training programme. On an average every training programme has 25 farmers, and as on date there are 713 KVKs, means about 17 lakh farmers are getting training every year. We have about 75 SAUs and about 120 ICAR institutes, if they organize about 15 training programmes in a year about one lakh farmers are trained. Every research and development institution organize at least one kisan mela per annum. If we consider participation of about 5000 farmers in every kisan mela, it comes to about 10 lakh farmers are in contact with scientists and researchers. State Departments of Agriculture, Union Ministry of Agriculture and other International institutions also organize such events a rough estimation can be made as, about five crore farmers are in direct contact with extension institutions. The numners seems to be very encouraging, but what about educational aspects??

The Union ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare claims that more than 12 crore soil health cards are distributed to farmers. But how many farmers really understand the results of soil nutrient analysis? How many apply fertilizers as per the results of soil analysis? If not why? The amount spent in the entire efforts is secondary, the time invested by professionals in this efforts would have yielded different results if they would have adopted the educational approach in their efforts. Not only in soil health cards issue it applies to training, field days, farmers fair and so on can yield wonderful results if they would have adopted educational approach.

What is this educational approach? The simple elements, the educational approach includes is change in knowledge, change in attitude and change in skill. Creation of learning situation, use of appropriate teaching strategy, method, teaching aids, etc have a specific role to play in effective education. Its extension educationist who can suggest suitable method, aid, strategy, medium, content, analysis of audience etc which are suitable for each situation.