This paper examines the challenges in reforming agricultural extension in India to meet the complex and heterogeneous demands of agricultural and rural development. While extension can and should play a much wider role in engaging with these issues, its performance remains restricted to the traditional one of technology dissemination. Fresh theoretical perspectives on the nature of innovation and appropriate institutional reform are opening up new vistas for extension. But the implementation of many of these necessary changes is hampered by outmoded understanding of its role and function, lack of partnerships among the different actors, limited expertise and lack of an explicit agenda on institutional learning.
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