About the Scope Foundation Mission
Many farmers, especially ones from underdeveloped and developing countries, rely on agriculture for their family’s livelihood. It’s the primary source of their food products and income. Agriculture provides direct employment for farmers who depend on it to sustain themselves and their families.
Scope will do Capacity building of farmers through training, demonstration, exposure visits, technical back stopping/ Hand holding on large scale. Behavioral change has to be brought out among farmers to adapt to new technologies being used in agriculture. Scope aims to create a Model village by adopting good agricultural practices and used for demonstration and replication of such Model village across the country.
Objectives:
- Training & Capacity Building of Agripreneurs
- Formation and development of Farmers group/community based organization/cooperatives for cross learning.
- Working capital / Revolving fund for CIGs/ farmers groups to undertake activities like collective procurement of farm inputs, group processing, value addition, collective marketing and any other innovative activities.
- investment on rural youth for promotion of agri-preneurship for self-employment as well as enhancing their employable skills for creating an opportunity for better employment through skill oriented training programs.
- Customized/personalized mobile based integrated agro-advisory services to the farmers.
- Establishment of single point resource center for agriculture and allied sectors at village level
- Production of Videos on improved and Innovative agricultural technologies and dissemination of technologies through video to the farmers.
- Creating awareness about flagship programs of center and state government to involve local community for better impact of such programs.
Problem Statement
The condition of most farmers is terrible. About 80% of farmers in India are marginal (less than 1 hectare) or small farmers (1–2 hectare) category. Agriculture supports about 60% of employment but contributes only 17% to GDP. Every day, there are reports of Indian farmer suicides from different parts of the country. The problem of small farmer livelihood is aggravated due to the fact that small farmers suffer from many production risks like drought, flood, lack of adequate use of inputs, poor extension leading to large yield gaps, lack of assured and adequate irrigation, crop failure and so on.
Main Problems often faced by Indian Farmers
- Insufficient Water Supply.
- Less Use of Modern Farming Equipment.
- Over Dependence on Traditional Crops.
- Poor Storage Facilities.
- Transportation Problems.
- High Interest Rates.
- Government Schemes are yet to reach Small Farmers.
About the Theme
Development of Agriculture continues to remain critical for India’s economic growth, poverty reduction and ensuring food security of the country, as over 58 per cent of the rural households depend on agriculture as their principal means of livelihood. Green Revolution which brought food sufficiency to the country was due to combination of technologies viz., hybrids and high yielding varieties, fertilizers and improved agronomic practices and public policy. This revolution was made possible through an Organized and Committed Agricultural Extension system that ably supported and supplemented the input intensive production system.
In spite of significant growth in agriculture, Indian Agriculture continues to face serious challenges such as declining soil; water and other natural resources; decreasing size of farm holding; Input use inefficiency; costly and scarce agriculture labour; drudgery in farming operations; growing risks in farming; information, knowledge and skill gaps; poor access to credit and investments; slow diffusion of relevant technologies; competitiveness of quality and prices in export & domestic markets; inadequate focus on processing and value addition; Low profitability of agriculture; inadequate rural infrastructure; poor access to resources and services for Women in agriculture; weak institutional linkages and convergence; Extreme events of Climate change etc. The real challenge remains in diffusion of the technologies generated by the research system to the farmers through an effective extension delivery system to address these challenges. Thus, extension is strategic to the growth of agriculture and allied sectors and enhancing the farmers’ income.
Public extension services are criticized for poor performance with lack of accountability to clients, lack of relevance and quality of their programs. This is mainly due to various limitations faced by the extension system such as inadequate resources; inadequate competency and skills of Extension worker towards market orientation, value orientation and IT; poor Research, Extension, Farmer and Market linkages; lack of convergence between departments and schemes; inadequate budget; procedural delay in release of funds and lack of transparency; inadequate operational flexibilities; top down approach of schemes and programs; lack of farmer participation in extension planning and implementation etc.
The challenges faced by the public extension system provide a space for pluralistic extension to involve various actors and service providers such as private agri- business companies, NGOs, producers’ organization in dissemination of agricultural technologies with additional manpower, knowledge, skills, expertise and leveraging Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds for overall development of agriculture.
The evolution of relationship between corporates and society has been one of the slow transformation from hardcore business to a philanthropic and from philanthropic to stakeholder participation. However, the data shows that, very meager amount of CSR fund has been spent in the agricultural sector by the companies though there is huge potential for investment in the sector. Agriculture cannot be seen in isolation. CSR may be looked in terms of “Creating Shared Value” wherein, business can help progress of agriculture and agriculture sector can help business to improve and flourish
