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| National network of Agri-Journalists (nnaj)-manage | | STRENGTHENING AGRI-JOURNALISM | | Dr. Parveen Kumar
Provision of timely and relevant information to the farming community is a sine-qua-non for enhancing the productivity and augmenting the agricultural production in the country. Till a few decades, public extension was the major source for disseminating the required information to the farming community. However, public extension came under severe criticism because of its inability to ensure last mile delivery of extension services, lack of accountability, financial constraints, inadequate extension personnels, a top down approach and its focus only on production ignoring marketing, value addition and processing. The agriculture sector in the country is already confronted with inadequate human resources to serve the farming community. The ratio of extension workers to farmers in the country stands very high at 1:1162 as against the recommended ratio of 1:750. This impacts the technology adoption rate which in many cases does not even exceed 40 per cent. As the country is dominated by marginal and small farmers who are resource poor; they are the one who have to suffer. Most of the farmers in the country do not have any idea about the Minimum Support Price of different commodities announced every year by the government, have no knowledge about crop insurance and other credit facilities that they can avail through different programmes of the government. All this ultimately affects the farm as well as the farming community in the country.
Agriculture sector is also suffering from another major issue and that is the inadequate coverage given to this sector in both print as well as broadcast media. From a little over 200 dailies published in the post-independence India, to over a 100,000 registered newspapers and periodicals as of 2015, the print media in India has matured to its full capacity, but the share of the agricultural content in the print media is negligible. Whereas, the print media could have been a powerful reliable source of communicating with farming community, seldom was it so. Farmers want real time information on weather, market price, input availability, insect pest management and on other issues. As such, there is an urgent need to disseminate, communicate and share relevant and timely information among not just the farming community, but also among all the stakeholders engaged in this profession. To strengthen and to overcome all these related constraints of the farming community, MANAGE Hyderabad has come up with an important intervention by creating a National Network of Agri-Journalists (NNAJ) all across the country. By this Network of Agricultural Journalists, MANAGE wishes to provide a dynamic platform for the agricultural journalists with an objective to facilitate rapid communication of agricultural information, new technologies, innovations, policy issues and best practices in agri/farm journalism. MANAGE as an important apex institute in the country is taking primarily care of the management needs of the extension functionaries of agriculture and allied departments. Journalists work on the principle, ‘Seeing is believing’ and that by the time one listens, half of the impact has gone. Similar will be the case where the agriculture journalists in the National Network of Agri-Journalists will document important stories, entrepreneurs and enterprises, processes, traditional wisdom, innovations and other relevant things which have an important impact on the society besides the usual task of providing information to farming community and other stakeholders. Agricultural Journalists are also expected to come to the rescue the farming community in times of situations which need immediate action by carrying out campaigns. These compaigns might relate to insect pest control like the locust invasion witnessed a year ago, on different government policies like the Farm Acts 2020, making aware about the Minimum Support Prices announced every year by the government or on new technologies where time is a constraints. As the Corona pandemic has made it impossible to be physical present with the farmers, such networks can prove their worth in this time. Publishing stories of how farmers cope up with the lockdown can be a motivation for others to follow. The agri-journalists have also to play a crucial role in providing right feedback from farmers to scientists, policy makers and planners.
Similar networks like NNAJ are also working in different parts across the globe. The International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) is a non-partisan, not-for-profit professional association for agricultural journalists in 55 countries. IFAJ members embrace freedom of the press. NNAJ-MANAGE has also set up a Whatsapp group comprising of 170 agri-journalists to whom it sends out messages and related news to keep members up to date about events and programmes regularly. Another important thing in NNAJ will be the linking of students’ interns form different agriculture universities with the members of NNAJ. To start with 11 students of University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka have been linked with NNAJ. The interns will learn how to document and how to develop linkages for sharing information.
Now, as the number of ICTs has grown up tremendously, the importance and role of agricultural extension personnels to become as agricultural journalists has grown much. This has also provided them with an opportunity to strengthen agricultural extension and get themselves widely recognized.
Huge space is available for agri-journalists given the number of print and broadcast media available in the country. The NNAJ is a suitable platform for such budding and potential journalist to come forward and improve their writing skills by writing on agriculture related issues and to further reach out the farmers by publishing small articles in their local dialect. I hope and do believe that NNAJ-MANAGE will play a great role in disseminating information and knowledge from labs to fields, up-to-date about events and programme development. |
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