AGRICULTURAL KNOWLEDGE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND INNOVATIONS FOR TECHNOLOGY DISSEMINATION AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceAchieving food security and environmental issues become greatest challenge of humankind. Further, natural resources are almost reaching its limit and hence there is a global call for optimum utilisation and also conservation of natural resources. In this existing scenario, sustainable natural resources management heavily relies on sound sustainable agricultural practices. The sustainable agricultural practices dissemination, diffusion and adoption depend on agricultural knowledge information systems. To disseminate sustainable agricultural knowledge and technology, worldwide agricultural extension systems are undergoing a great transition. Efforts for reforming national extension systems are underway. At the same time, the agriculture knowledge infrastructure is evolving in a big way with the emergence of pluralistic extension providers and innovations to disseminate sustainable agricultural technologies to the farming community. A research study was conducted in India to compare the extension objectives and nature of the farm technologies disseminated by the public extension, agri-business firms, agricultural consultancies and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) indicated that a great majority of the farmers had favourable perception towards the technologies transferred by the NGOs. Because, NGOs' extension personnel disseminated location and client specific, need based, locally feasible technologies with more emphasis on local wisdom and traditional knowledge blending with the low input modern farm technologies. The technological attributes wise perception of the clientele were alos documented. Further, this article make an attempt to review and analyse recent developments in sustainable farm technology delivery systems and reform measures such as; decentralization, privatization, demand driven and participatory approaches in farm technology delivery. Further, this article highlights the innovations for sustainable technology dissemination and diffusion such as; farmer to farmer extension, single window extension delivery, integrated and broad based extension, gender specific extension, farmer participatory research and extension, validation, refinement and integration of indigenous knowledge systems with modern farm technology, self help group (SHG) approaches, grass root institutions, multi agency extension, market extension, environmental extension education, extension plus approaches, public-private-NGO partnerships and information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives