India’s ambition of becoming a developed nation by 2047 requires a fundamental overhaul of its agricultural extension system, moving beyond the traditional top-down model of technology dissemination.
The authors argue for a shift towards an “agricultural opportunity system” that connects farmers with appropriate technologies, finance, markets and risk-management services.
They outline four pillars: adopting a systems perspective, providing real-time and AI-enabled human advisories, scaling proven innovations and building a coordinated, pluralistic extension ecosystem.
India has set itself an ambitious target of becoming a developed nation by 2047 under its Viksit Bharat vision. Even by conservative estimates, achieving this ambition will require agriculture to grow by 4 per cent annually in real terms. The challenge is compounded by resource depletion, climate change and disruptions to input supply chains caused by geopolitical tensions.
The productivity boost can be achieved only by adopting improved technologies that are not only more productive but also sustainable.
Discussions on this topic often draws parallels with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when new technologies in short-duration, input-responsive varieties were introduced alongside an ecosystem that made their adoption a rational choice for farmers. This included intensive extension services, subsidies for digging irrigation wells, subsidised electricity for pumping water and assured procurement prices through Minimum Support Price (MSP) system.
Taken together, these interventions made switching to the new varieties an attractive proposition for the farming community at large.
Since then, however, India has faced an “agricultural technology adoption puzzle”: innovations that appear promising in research settings often fail to gain traction in the field. Often, the extension system takes the blame, but the problem is broader and reflects a lack of systems thinking.
The fact is that the current extension advisory system (EAS) remains bound to a 20th-century model of top-down technology transfer. It treats technologies as static artefacts that can be transferred from laboratories to farms with little adaptation.
The extension system needs to move beyond that mindset and recognise that technology change is a complex process. Technologies must be tested, modified and adapted to local conditions, often with farmers playing an active role in shaping their adoption. This requires an enabling environment that takes account of the wider agricultural ecosystem.
In a nutshell, business-as-usual extension services cannot support the complex, modern food systems. India must pivot from an “extension system” focused on disseminating information to an "agricultural opportunity system” that brokers opportunities and coordinates the institutions and services farmers need to make the most of them.
From information providers to opportunity brokers
The first step is to rethink the relationship between farmers and extension agents. At present, most extension efforts assume that farmers will automatically adopt a technology if it promises higher yields, lower costs and other measurable benefits. This assumption is flawed in several ways.
It overlooks the practical barriers to adoption, including access to the services and infrastructure needed to use a technology. New technology also brings learning costs and uncertainty, which a risk-averse farmer may be reluctant to bear. Moreover, farmers do not always optimise for yield or cost alone; ease of production and taste preferences may matter just as much.
We therefore propose a fundamental change in the role of frontline extension agents. Rather than simply conveying information, they should become opportunity brokers and system orchestrator. We call this approach the “agricultural opportunity system”, built around four pillars mentioned below.
Adopt a systems perspective: An agricultural opportunity system would move away from promoting pre-determined technology packages. Instead, it would begin by understanding farmers' aspirations, local constraints and other interconnected elements of the agricultural system. Once a participatory approach identifies the available technologies and services, they must be tailored to match localised agro-ecological conditions, soil and water constraints, market demand and household-level farmer capacity. At the same time, expand the mandate beyond agronomy to include export compliance, sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards, traceability and quality certification.
Replace generic advice with living advisories: Replace static, seasonal "Package of Practices" with dynamic, real-time decision support systems. Integrate automatic weather station data, satellite imagery, and localised pest models to adjust recommendations in real time. This would require careful Positioning of AI. AI provides data intelligence and rapid analytics, but human extension workers provide context, trust, and field orchestration. At this point, it does not seem like a good idea to build and deploy a completely AI-based extension system because of accountability concerns. The way forward is to develop an AI-enabled but human-in-the-loop system.
Scale what is ready, not everything that is promising: Overcome the pilot trap where unproven innovations are scaled prematurely, while successful pilots remain isolated. Avoiding this requires establishing rigorous technology readiness and scaling assessment frameworks prior to statewide promotion. Scale innovations selectively based on economic viability, ecological footprint and systemic risk.
Build a coordinated and pluralistic ecosystem: Fragmented policymaking must give way to a coherent food-systems approach, along the lines advocated by the UN Food Systems Summit. Such an approach would recognise the trade-offs across nutrition, water, energy, income, and other sectors to ensure better policy coherence and avoid perverse incentives. There is also a need for fostering a genuinely pluralistic extension ecosystem, where public extension agencies, agri-tech start-ups, farmer producer organisations (FPOs), input suppliers and civil society organisations should work together under clear arrangements for coordination and accountability.
For the agriculture sector to contribute meaningfully to the vision of Viksit Bharat, we need to rethink the fundamental purpose of extension. Piecemeal interventions and the positioning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a panacea for the sector’s problems are unlikely to deliver lasting results. Institutional reorientation must focus on equipping extension service providers to broker end-to-end solutions that connect farmers with finance, technology, markets and risk management, rather than leaving them to merely distribute technical advice and leaflets.
Repositioning the extension system as an opportunity system with emphasis on understanding farmers' aspirations, context, technology suitability, assessing system-wide impacts, and scaling assessments is the need of the hour.
The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.