Veterinary · Para-clinical · also MSVE VAE-311
Rural sociology and the methods used to take animal-health knowledge to farmers, with the history of livestock and dairy development programmes in several regions.
In the exams: ICAR AIEEA-PG 14 (Veterinary Extension); TNPSC Extension 10; RPSC (Operation Flood, schemes, livestock census, insurance); Nepal NLEV Social Science 6
Veterinary and animal husbandry extension education is the study of how knowledge about animal health, breeding, feeding and management reaches the people who keep animals, and how those people decide whether to use it. It joins three things: rural sociology, which describes the communities in which livestock are kept; the behavioural science of teaching, learning and communication; and the history and machinery of livestock development programmes. A vaccine that farmers do not bring their animals for, or a breeding policy that the village does not trust, achieves nothing. Extension is the part of the veterinary curriculum that deals with that gap.
Most of the world's livestock are kept by smallholders and pastoralists, and in South Asia much of the daily feeding, milking and care is done by women. A veterinarian in an Indian block hospital or a Bangladeshi upazila spends much of the week persuading, demonstrating, organising camps and reporting on schemes. Behind those tasks lies theory: how people adopt innovations, how communication fails, how a programme is planned with people, and how results are measured.
The subject is weighted most heavily in India and Nepal: ICAR AIEEA-PG lists Veterinary Extension in the Animal Sciences group, state commissions ask about methods, Operation Flood, Key Village, ICDP, gosadans, Panchayati Raj and schemes, and the Nepal licensure examination has a social science section. This manual follows the MSVE units, giving general theory first and then the Indian programmes the units name. Where a figure varies by year or state it says so.
Sociology is the scientific study of society: of social relationships, groups, institutions and the way they change. Auguste Comte coined the word and is called the father of sociology. Rural sociology applies this study to rural people: their occupations, settlements, institutions, beliefs and the way they respond to change. Before telling a village how to deworm calves, the worker needs to know who owns and feeds them, who decides on spending, and which leaders people trust.
Sorokin and Zimmerman, in their classic work on rural-urban sociology, set out the differences between rural and urban communities. Rural communities are mainly agricultural in occupation, live closer to nature, are smaller and less dense, more homogeneous in culture, less differentiated and less stratified by occupation, less mobile, and rely more on personal, face-to-face interaction. Urban communities show the opposite tendencies. These are differences of degree along a rural-urban continuum.
Ferdinand Tonnies described a similar contrast between Gemeinschaft, a community bound by kinship, neighbourhood and shared sentiment, and Gesellschaft, an association bound by contract and self-interest. Villages lean towards the first, cities towards the second.
A social group is two or more people who interact, share a sense of belonging and have common goals or norms. Charles Horton Cooley called the family, the play group and the neighbourhood primary groups: small, face-to-face, intimate and lasting, and the main shapers of attitudes. Secondary groups, such as a milk cooperative, a political party or a government department, are larger, more formal and built around a specific purpose. William Graham Sumner distinguished the in-group, to which a person feels loyalty, from the out-group. A reference group is one whose standards a person uses to judge himself or herself, even without belonging to it; a farmer who copies a progressive dairy farmer from the next village is using that farmer's household as a reference group.
Culture is the whole way of life of a people, learned and shared. It has material parts, such as the house, the cattle shed and the chaff cutter, and non-material parts, such as beliefs, values and customs. William Ogburn used the term cultural lag for the delay with which non-material culture catches up with material change. Sumner divided norms into folkways, which are customary ways whose breach brings mild disapproval, and mores, which carry strong moral force and whose breach brings severe sanction. Beliefs about cattle slaughter in much of India are mores, not folkways, and extension advice about culling must respect them.
Social control keeps members within norms, formally through law and informally through gossip, ridicule and religion; in villages informal control is strong.
A social institution is an established, lasting pattern of behaviour organised around a basic need. The main ones in rural life are the family, marriage, religion, the economy, the polity and education. In South Asia caste has been a central stratifying institution: membership is by birth, marriage is usually within the caste, and occupation and social distance were traditionally linked to it. The jajmani system was the traditional exchange of services between caste households and landowners for a share of the harvest. Social stratification is the ranking of people into layers by wealth, power, prestige or birth; social mobility is movement between those layers, and Sorokin distinguished vertical from horizontal mobility. Extension has often been criticised for reaching larger farmers first.
Social change is any alteration in social structure or relationships over time; resistance comes from habit, cost, vested interests and incompatibility with values.
Gender analysis asks who does what, who owns what and who decides. In most South Asian smallholder households women do much of the shed cleaning, feeding, milking and care of sick and young animals, while men more often sell animals, buy inputs and deal with officials, and larger animals and land are more often in men's names. Extension that speaks only to men misses the person who carries out the advice, so meetings must suit women's times and places, and women extension workers, community livestock workers and women's dairy cooperatives help. Gender analysis frameworks such as the Harvard Analytical Framework, built on an activity profile and an access-and-control profile, and Moser's framework, built on women's triple role and practical versus strategic gender needs, give a structure for this work.
Leadership is the ability to influence a group towards its goals. Rural leaders may be formal, holding a position such as sarpanch, or informal, recognised through respect. Methods for identifying them include the sociometric method of Jacob Moreno, in which members name whom they consult and the most-chosen are leaders; the key-informant method; the self-designating method; and the positional method, which simply lists office holders.
A tribe is a social group, usually with a common name, a defined territory, a common dialect, a shared culture and descent from a common ancestor real or mythical, which is largely endogamous and has its own customary system of authority. In India, Scheduled Tribes are those notified by the President under Article 342 of the Constitution. The Fifth Schedule governs administration of Scheduled Areas in most states, and the Sixth Schedule provides autonomous district councils for tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram.
Livestock play a different role in many tribal economies than in settled plains agriculture. Pigs and backyard poultry are central in many tribal communities of central and north-eastern India; goats and sheep are kept widely; the mithun is a culturally important bovine in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram; and pastoral and transhumant groups such as the Gujjars and Bakarwals of the western Himalaya, the Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh, the Raikas or Rebaris of Rajasthan and the Todas of the Nilgiris, with their buffaloes, keep herds that move with the seasons.
Nehru's Panchsheel for tribal development asked that tribal people develop along the lines of their own genius, that their rights in land and forest be respected, that they be administered through their own social institutions and that results be judged by the quality of human character rather than money spent. The Tribal Sub-Plan strategy was adopted in the Fifth Five Year Plan, with Integrated Tribal Development Projects as its units. For the extension worker: learn the local language and customary authority, respect ritual uses of animals, build on ethnoveterinary knowledge, and design inputs that fit scavenging, low-input systems.
Urban communities are large, dense, heterogeneous and occupationally specialised. Social relationships are more impersonal and formal, mobility is higher and control is exercised mainly through law. Livestock in cities take several forms: peri-urban and intra-urban dairies supplying fresh milk, often with buffaloes and crossbred cows kept on purchased feed; urban backyard poultry and goats among low-income households; working animals such as draught horses and donkeys; stray and abandoned cattle; and a large and growing population of companion animals.
These settings raise their own extension problems. Dairies in cities generate dung and wastewater that local bodies regulate; animals scavenging on garbage swallow plastic and metal; zoonoses such as rabies, brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis are closer to dense human populations; and residues and adulteration in milk sold directly to consumers concern food-safety regulators. The audiences are different too: urban owners read, use mobile phones and social media, respond to municipal regulation, and judge services by convenience and cost. Mass media, digital channels, licensing and enforcement play a larger role in urban extension than in village work, while village extension relies more on demonstrations, local leaders and group meetings.
The peri-urban fringe, where grazing disappears and city markets pull milk from nearby villages, needs both rural community methods and urban regulatory tools.
The word extension came into use in England in the 1870s, when the University of Cambridge began university extension lectures that took teaching beyond its walls to people who could not attend. In agriculture the idea took institutional form in the United States: the Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant colleges, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service linking the federal government, the land-grant universities and the counties. Seaman A. Knapp, often called the father of American extension, popularised the result demonstration on farmers' own fields and is credited with the saying that what a man hears he may doubt, what he sees he may possibly doubt, but what he does himself he cannot doubt.
Extension education has been defined in many ways. Kelsey and Hearne described it as a system of out-of-school education for rural people. J. Paul Leagans described extension education as an applied behavioural science whose knowledge is applied to bring about desirable changes in the behavioural complex of people, using strategies and programmes in the fields of agriculture and related sciences. The changes extension aims at are commonly summarised as changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes, and through them in practices and in the living standard of the family.
Unlike formal education, extension has no fixed curriculum, works with voluntary adult learners, is problem-centred, uses the farm as classroom and is judged by changes in practice rather than marks.
The basic philosophy of extension is to help people to help themselves. The extension worker is a teacher and facilitator, not a supplier of free goods or a substitute for the farmer's own decisions. Several ideas follow from this. Extension starts where people are, with their felt needs and their present level of knowledge, not with what the agency wishes to promote. It is democratic and voluntary: people participate because they see benefit. It values the individual and the family as the unit of change. And it works with and through local institutions and leaders so that change continues when the agency withdraws.
The broad objectives are to increase production and income from livestock, to improve the health and welfare of animals, to raise the standard of living of rural families, to develop rural leadership and self-reliance, and to link research with practice by carrying problems back from the field to research institutions as well as carrying findings to the field.
Textbooks list the principles of extension in slightly different ways, but the core set is consistent. The principle of interests and needs says that work must begin with the felt needs of the people, which the extension worker may help them recognise. The principle of cultural difference says that methods must suit the culture of the audience, since a method that works with educated urban owners may fail with a tribal hamlet. The principle of participation says that people should take part in deciding, planning and carrying out programmes, so they own them. The principle of grassroots organisation says that work should be organised through local groups that represent the people. The principle of adaptability says methods and programmes must be flexible to local conditions. The principle of leadership says local leaders should be identified, trained and used. The whole-family principle says extension should reach every member of the family, because men, women and young people all take part in farm and livestock decisions. The principles of cooperation, satisfaction and evaluation say that work should build cooperation among people and agencies, that the end result must bring satisfaction to the learner, and that results must be evaluated continuously. Extension is also an applied science that uses findings from many disciplines, and its method is learning by doing, carried out by trained specialists who support generalist field staff.
Leagans described the teaching-learning situation as having five elements: an instructor, learners, subject matter, teaching materials and equipment, and a physical setting. Wilson and Gallup described the steps through which extension teaching moves a person as attention, interest, desire, conviction, action and satisfaction.
Thorndike's laws of readiness, exercise and effect support these ideas: people learn when ready, through practice, and when the result satisfies.
An innovation is an idea, practice or object perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption; whether it is objectively new does not matter. Adoption is the decision to make full use of an innovation as the best course of action available. Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. Adoption is therefore an individual process and diffusion a social one.
Early rural sociological work, summarised by Beal and Bohlen in the 1950s, described five stages of adoption: awareness, when the person first learns of the idea; interest, when the person seeks more information; evaluation, when the person mentally applies the idea to his or her own situation; trial, when the idea is tried on a small scale; and adoption, when it is used fully and continuously. Everett Rogers, in Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1962, later replaced this with the innovation-decision process: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation. The later model recognises that a person may decide to reject an innovation, and that people who have adopted may discontinue if their experience is poor, which the confirmation stage captures.
Different channels matter at different stages. Mass media are relatively more important in creating awareness and knowledge; interpersonal channels, especially contact with peers and trusted local people, are relatively more important in persuasion and decision.
When the cumulative number of adopters is plotted against time, the curve is usually S-shaped: slow at first, then rapid, then levelling off as the system approaches saturation. When the number of new adopters per period is plotted, the curve approaches a bell-shaped normal distribution. Rogers used this to divide adopters by their time of adoption, using the mean and standard deviation. Innovators adopt earlier than the mean minus two standard deviations and make up about 2.5 per cent; early adopters adopt between mean minus two and mean minus one standard deviation, about 13.5 per cent; the early majority between mean minus one standard deviation and the mean, about 34 per cent; the late majority between the mean and mean plus one standard deviation, about 34 per cent; and laggards after mean plus one standard deviation, about 16 per cent.
Each category has characteristic traits. Innovators are venturesome, cosmopolite, have wider contacts outside the village and can absorb losses. Early adopters are more integrated into the local system and contain the highest proportion of opinion leaders, so extension workers seek them out. The early majority deliberate before adopting; the late majority are sceptical and adopt under economic necessity and peer pressure; laggards are oriented to the past and often have the fewest resources. Poor households often adopt late because the risk is unaffordable.
The classic empirical study was Ryan and Gross's study of hybrid seed corn among Iowa farmers, published in 1943, which first showed the S-shaped curve and the role of neighbours in adoption.
Rogers named five perceived attributes of an innovation that explain much of its rate of adoption. Relative advantage is the degree to which the innovation is seen as better than what it replaces, in profit, saving of labour, or status. Compatibility is consistency with existing values, past experience and needs. Complexity is the difficulty of understanding and using it, and it is the only one of the five negatively related to adoption. Trialability is the degree to which it can be tried on a limited basis. Observability is the degree to which its results are visible to others. Mineral mixture feeding is cheap, simple and trialable but its results appear slowly and are hard to see; a crossbred calf is highly observable.
Opinion leaders are people who are able to influence others' attitudes or behaviour informally and with some frequency. The two-step flow hypothesis, from the work of Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet on the 1940 United States election, proposed that ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders and from them to the wider public. Later work showed the flow is often multi-step, but the practical lesson holds: reach and train the opinion leaders. A change agent is a professional who influences clients' innovation decisions in a direction the agency thinks desirable, such as a veterinarian or extension officer. Rogers noted that communication is most effective between people who are similar, which he called homophily, but that diffusion needs some heterophily, since similar people share the same information.
Extension teaching methods are usually classified by the number of people reached at one time into individual, group and mass methods. They can also be classified by form, as written, spoken or visual. No single method is best: the right choice depends on the objective, the stage of adoption, the audience, the resources available and the time. Studies of extension methods by Wilson and Gallup in the United States and many later studies show that people who are exposed to several methods are more likely to adopt than those exposed to one, so methods are combined.
Individual or personal-contact methods include the farm and home visit, office calls by farmers to the hospital or extension office, telephone calls, personal letters, and the result demonstration conducted on one farmer's field or herd. They build trust, allow the advice to be fitted to that farm, and give the worker first-hand knowledge of conditions. They are also the most expensive per person reached, so they are best used for innovators, opinion leaders, for solving specific problems and for follow-up.
Group methods reach a number of people at once, allow discussion and use the influence of the group on its members. The method demonstration shows how to do something, step by step, so that people learn a skill: drenching a goat, preparing urea-treated straw, making a mineral lick block, or clean milking. It is short, can be repeated, and should be followed by participants doing the task themselves. The result demonstration shows what happens when a practice is used, by comparing it with the usual practice over time, such as a group of calves dewormed on schedule compared with an untreated group. It takes longer, needs careful records and is highly persuasive because people see the result on a neighbour's farm. Knapp's demonstrations were of this kind.
Other group methods include meetings, field days, exposure tours, animal health and infertility camps, calf rallies, training courses and farmer field schools.
Formal discussion formats have exact meanings that examiners test. A lecture is a prepared talk by one person. A symposium is a series of short prepared talks by several experts on different aspects of a subject, followed by questions. A panel is an informal conversation among a few experts in front of an audience, guided by a moderator. A seminar is a group of people studying a subject under a leader, presenting papers and discussing them. A workshop is a group that meets to work on a practical problem and produce something. A conference is a large meeting of people to discuss a common problem. A buzz session breaks a large audience into small groups for a short discussion; the Phillips 66 version, attributed to J. Donald Phillips, uses groups of six for six minutes. Brainstorming, from Alex Osborn, asks a group for as many ideas as possible without criticism, which is postponed to a later stage. Kurt Lewin's work founded the study of group dynamics, the forces that act within a group.
Mass methods reach large numbers quickly and at low cost per person. They include radio and television, newspapers and farm magazines, bulletins, leaflets and folders, posters, exhibitions, campaigns, film and video shows, and digital media. Their strength is creating awareness and keeping people informed of timely matters, such as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a vaccination drive or a weather warning. They are largely one-way and weak at changing long-held practices.
A campaign is an intensive teaching activity focused on one problem at the time it is most relevant, using many methods together for a short period, such as a rabies vaccination week or a mastitis-control drive before the flush season.
The worker chooses a combination. For awareness, mass media and posters; for interest and knowledge, meetings and leaflets; for evaluation, result demonstrations and field days; for trial, method demonstrations and supply of inputs; for confirmation, follow-up visits. The cost per person reached falls from individual to mass methods, while depth of influence on each person usually rises from mass to individual methods.
Communication is the process by which messages are transferred from a source to a receiver so that a common understanding is reached. Leagans defined it as the process by which two or more people exchange ideas, facts, feelings or impressions in ways that each gains a common understanding of the meaning, intent and use of messages. Extension is communication with an educational purpose.
Aristotle's model of rhetoric had three parts: the speaker, the speech and the audience. Harold Lasswell, in 1948, described communication by asking who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, in 1949, described an information source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver and a destination, with noise as anything that distorts the signal between them. David Berlo's SMCR model of 1960 named source, message, channel and receiver, and listed factors that affect each, such as the communication skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system and culture of source and receiver. Wilbur Schramm emphasised that communication works only where the fields of experience of sender and receiver overlap, and with Osgood described communication as circular, each party encoding, interpreting and decoding in turn. Leagans' extension model lists communicator, message, channel, treatment of the message, audience and audience response.
Feedback is the receiver's response returned to the source, letting it correct the message. Noise may be physical, such as a generator at a camp, or semantic, such as jargon. Fidelity is how faithfully the message arrives; source credibility rests on competence and trustworthiness. People show selective exposure, perception and retention, favouring messages that fit existing beliefs.
Audio-visual aids are instructional devices that help the learner use more than one sense, so that teaching is clearer, more interesting and better remembered. They are classified as audio aids, such as radio, audio recordings and public address; visual aids, either projected, such as slides, filmstrips and overhead or digital projection, or non-projected, such as charts, posters, flash cards, flannel graphs, photographs, models, specimens and bulletin boards; and audio-visual aids, such as television, films and video, which combine sound and image.
Edgar Dale's cone of experience arranges learning experiences from the most concrete at the base to the most abstract at the top. Direct, purposeful experience, such as handling the animal oneself, is at the base; contrived experiences such as models, dramatised experiences, demonstrations, field trips, exhibits, motion pictures and television, recordings and still pictures follow; visual symbols such as charts come near the top and verbal symbols, the spoken or written word, are at the apex. The cone is not a ranking of value; it shows that abstract learning builds on concrete experience.
Each aid has rules of good use. A poster should carry one idea, a few large words and a striking picture, be readable at a distance and be placed where people stop. A flash card set is a series of cards shown in sequence to tell a story, with one idea per card and the talk on the back for the speaker. A flannel graph lets cut-outs be built up on a cloth board as the talk proceeds. Models help where the real object is too large, small or rare to handle. Pre-test every aid with a few members of the audience.
Information and communication technology has widened the channels open to extension. Radio remains important where literacy and connectivity are low; in India, All India Radio's Farm and Home programmes and Doordarshan's Krishi Darshan are long-running examples, and community radio stations run by universities, KVKs and NGOs broadcast in local dialects. Television reaches large audiences with demonstrations that people can see.
Mobile telephony now carries voice advisories, interactive voice response, SMS reminders for vaccination and deworming dates, and smartphone applications for breeding records, artificial insemination and disease reporting. Toll-free farmer helplines such as India's Kisan Call Centres answer questions in local languages and pass difficult cases to specialists. Animal identification databases linked to ear tags let vaccination, insurance and breeding services be targeted and followed up.
ICT does not remove the need for face-to-face extension. Digital divides by gender, age, literacy and income mean that the poorest households and many women are reached least. Information without inputs, credit or services does not change practice. Good ICT-based extension uses local languages, voice and video rather than text where literacy is low, links advice to a service the farmer can actually obtain, and keeps a human contact point.
An extension programme is a statement of the situation, objectives, problems and solutions, prepared jointly by the people and the extension agency. Kelsey and Hearne distinguished the programme, which is the statement of situation, objectives, problems and solutions, from the plan of work, which sets out what is to be done, by whom, how, when and where to reach the programme's objectives, and from the calendar of work, which places the activities of the plan of work in time order. A project is a specific piece of work with defined objectives, resources and time within a programme.
The principles of extension programme planning are that the programme should be based on an analysis of facts about the situation; select problems according to the people's felt needs; set objectives and solutions that offer satisfaction; be permanent yet flexible; have balance with emphasis on the most important problems; have a definite plan of work; be a continuous teaching process; coordinate with other agencies and institutions; involve the local people and their institutions; and provide for evaluation of results.
The steps in planning an extension programme form a cycle. First comes the collection of facts about the area: people, land, livestock population and composition, production levels, disease situation, feed resources, markets, services and institutions, from secondary records such as the livestock census and from the people themselves. Second is the analysis of the situation to understand what the facts mean. Third is the identification of problems, separating felt needs from unfelt needs that the worker may need to make people aware of. Fourth is the setting of objectives, which should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Fifth is the development of the plan of work and calendar of work, including choice of teaching methods and resources. Sixth is the execution of the plan. Seventh is the evaluation of progress and results. Eighth is reconsideration, in which the results lead to revision of the programme for the next cycle.
Objectives in extension are framed at several levels. Broad, fundamental objectives such as better living for rural families are reached through general objectives such as higher milk production, which in turn are reached through working objectives such as getting farmers to feed mineral mixture daily to milking cows. Working objectives should state the audience, the change in behaviour sought and the content, so that it is clear what success looks like.
Rapid rural appraisal developed in the 1970s as a faster, cheaper alternative to long questionnaire surveys, using a multidisciplinary team, semi-structured interviews and direct observation. Participatory rural appraisal, associated above all with Robert Chambers, developed in the late 1980s and 1990s. It shifts the role of outsiders from extracting information to facilitating local people's own analysis, using visual and group methods that do not require literacy. Its principles include handing over the stick, meaning letting local people draw and lead; optimal ignorance and appropriate imprecision, meaning collecting only what is needed at the precision needed; triangulation, meaning cross-checking information by several methods, sources and team members; and self-critical awareness by the facilitators.
Common PRA tools include the social map of households, which can show who owns which animals; the resource map, showing grazing land, water and fodder sources; the transect walk across the village with local people, noting land use and problems along the way; the seasonal calendar of rainfall, fodder availability, disease, labour, births and income; the timeline and trend analysis of events and changes; the Venn or chapati diagram showing institutions and how important and close they are to the community; the daily activity clock of men and women, which reveals the gendered division of livestock work; pair-wise and matrix ranking of problems, breeds or diseases; wealth ranking; and livestock mobility maps for pastoral groups.
Participatory epidemiology adapted these tools to animal disease and helped target surveillance in the final stages of rinderpest eradication in pastoral Africa. Farmer field schools, begun in Asia for rice pest management, have been adapted to livestock.
Evaluation is the systematic process of judging the worth or effectiveness of a programme against its objectives, using evidence. Monitoring is the continuous tracking of inputs, activities and outputs during implementation to see whether the work is on schedule; evaluation asks the larger question of whether objectives were met and why. In extension the objectives are changes in people's behaviour and their consequences, so evaluation must measure those changes and not only count activities.
Evaluation may be classified by timing. Ex-ante or pre-project evaluation appraises a proposal before it starts; formative or ongoing evaluation is done during implementation to improve the programme; summative or terminal evaluation is done at the end to judge overall results; and ex-post evaluation is done some time after completion to judge lasting impact. It may be internal, external or participatory.
A good evaluation has validity, measuring what it claims to measure; reliability, giving consistent results on repeated measurement; objectivity, so that different evaluators would agree; and practicability within the time and money available. Indicators are measurable signs of change chosen for each objective, such as the percentage of cows in a village dewormed on schedule. A baseline, collected before the programme starts, is the reference against which change is measured. Without a baseline, and ideally a comparison group that did not receive the programme, it is hard to attribute change to the programme rather than to rain, prices or other schemes.
Claude Bennett's hierarchy of evidence for extension programmes, published in 1975, arranges seven levels from the easiest to measure to the most meaningful. They are inputs, meaning the resources spent; activities, the events conducted; people involvement, the number and kind of people taking part; reactions, how participants felt about the activities; KASA change, meaning change in knowledge, attitudes, skills and aspirations; practice change, meaning adoption of the recommended practices; and end results, meaning the economic, social and environmental outcomes such as more milk, higher income or lower calf mortality. Kirkpatrick's four levels for training evaluation, reaction, learning, behaviour and results, make the same point for training courses.
The steps of evaluation are to state the objectives of the programme clearly in terms of behaviour change; select the indicators and the kind of evidence needed; decide the design and sample, ideally with baseline and comparison groups; develop and pre-test the tools, such as questionnaires, knowledge tests, attitude scales and observation schedules; collect the data; analyse and interpret them; and report and use the findings in reconsidering the programme. Knowledge is often measured as a knowledge index, the score obtained divided by the maximum possible score, times one hundred. Adoption of a package of practices can be measured with an adoption index built the same way. Attitude scales such as Likert's summated rating scale and Thurstone's equal-appearing interval scale are used to measure attitudes.
Frontline and result demonstrations are evaluated partly by comparing yields. Three yields are compared: the potential yield achievable under research conditions, the yield achieved in the demonstration on farmers' herds, and the yield achieved by farmers using their usual practice. The technology gap is the potential yield minus the demonstration yield; it measures how far field conditions fall short of what the technology can do. The extension gap is the demonstration yield minus the farmers' yield; it measures what extension could gain by persuading farmers to adopt the demonstrated practice. The technology index is the technology gap divided by the potential yield, times one hundred; a lower index means the technology performs closer to its potential in the field. The per cent increase over farmers' practice is the extension gap divided by the farmers' yield, times one hundred.
For example, if improved feeding has a potential daily milk yield of 12 litres per cow, demonstration herds average 10 litres and farmers' usual practice gives 8 litres, the technology gap is 2 litres, the extension gap is 2 litres, the technology index is 2 divided by 12, or 16.7 per cent, and the increase over farmers' practice is 2 divided by 8, or 25 per cent. The herds compared must be similar in breed, parity and stage of lactation.
Community development is a process designed to create conditions of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation and the fullest possible reliance on its own initiative. It is both a method, working with communities to identify needs and act on them, and a movement for local self-reliance. It is multipurpose rather than single-sector, covering agriculture, animal husbandry, health, education, roads, cooperation and social welfare together.
India had several rural reconstruction experiments before Independence and soon after. Rabindranath Tagore's Sriniketan centre began in the early 1920s; Spencer Hatch's Marthandam project in Travancore worked through the YMCA in the same period; F. L. Brayne's Gurgaon experiment in the 1920s pushed village uplift through government officials; the Baroda rural reconstruction programme was led by V. T. Krishnamachari; the Firka Development scheme was launched in Madras in 1946; the Nilokheri project, led by S. K. Dey, resettled refugees after Partition; and the Etawah Pilot Project in Uttar Pradesh, begun in 1948 under the American planner Albert Mayer, tested the village-level multipurpose worker and became the model for the national programme.
The Community Development Programme was launched on 2 October 1952 with 55 projects. The National Extension Service followed on 2 October 1953, giving a less intensive form of the same approach to more areas. The unit of administration became the development block, headed by a Block Development Officer with a team of subject-matter extension officers, including one for animal husbandry, and multipurpose Village Level Workers, or gram sevaks, each responsible for a group of villages.
It was criticised for becoming a government programme rather than a people's movement, spreading resources thinly and favouring larger farmers. These criticisms led to the Balwantrai Mehta Committee and to Panchayati Raj, and to more focused programmes: the Intensive Agricultural District Programme of 1960, the Intensive Agricultural Areas Programme, the High Yielding Varieties Programme and, for livestock, the Intensive Cattle Development Project. Later extension reforms included the Training and Visit system promoted by the World Bank from the 1970s, with fixed fortnightly visits and regular training of village extension workers by subject-matter specialists; the ICAR Krishi Vigyan Kendras, the first of which opened at Puducherry in 1974; ICAR's Lab-to-Land programme of 1979; and the Agricultural Technology Management Agency at district level, first piloted in the late 1990s.
The Balwantrai Mehta Committee, appointed to review the Community Development Programme, reported in 1957 and recommended democratic decentralisation through a three-tier system: the gram panchayat at village level, the panchayat samiti at block level and the zila parishad at district level. Rajasthan was the first state to inaugurate it, at Nagaur on 2 October 1959. The Ashok Mehta Committee of 1977-78 recommended a two-tier system with the mandal panchayat as the base. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992, in force from April 1993, gave panchayats constitutional status. It provides for the gram sabha of all registered voters of the village, a three-tier structure in states above a population threshold, direct elections every five years, reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population, reservation of not less than one-third of seats and chairperson posts for women, a State Election Commission and a State Finance Commission. Many states have since raised women's reservation to one-half. The Eleventh Schedule lists 29 subjects that states may devolve to panchayats; animal husbandry, dairying and poultry is one of them, and fisheries is another.
In livestock development panchayats can identify beneficiaries for schemes through the gram sabha, manage village grazing lands and water sources, organise vaccination and health camps with the veterinary department, control stray animals, maintain cattle pounds, support carcass disposal and sanitation, include livestock works in village development plans, and monitor attendance and performance of local veterinary institutions where states have devolved them. How much power panchayats actually hold over veterinary staff and funds varies widely by state.
The Key Village Scheme was launched in 1951-52 in the First Five Year Plan as the first organised national programme for cattle improvement in India. Its idea was to concentrate effort in compact areas where improvement could be achieved and seen, rather than spreading thin across the country. A key village block centred on an artificial insemination centre, with key village units attached to it.
The scheme had several components: breeding of improved animals through artificial insemination and approved bulls; castration of scrub, or inferior, bulls so that only improved sires bred; control of contagious diseases; development of fodder and better feeding; and organised marketing of milk and other products. It was the scheme that introduced artificial insemination on a large scale in India. Its weaknesses were small scattered units, feed development lagging behind breeding, and weak milk marketing. These lessons shaped the more integrated Intensive Cattle Development Project.
India's large population of old, infirm and unproductive cattle, which for religious and cultural reasons are not slaughtered in much of the country, has long competed with productive animals for scarce feed. The Gosadan scheme, also begun in the First Five Year Plan, aimed to move such cattle out of breeding tracts and villages into gosadans, camps in remote areas with grazing and forest land, where they could live out their lives at low cost and where their hides, bones and dung could be used. This relieved pressure on village grazing and removed unwanted bulls from breeding. Few gosadans became self-sustaining.
Goshalas are traditional charitable institutions, usually run by trusts and religious bodies with public donations, which shelter cows, especially old, abandoned and stray animals. Many also keep productive cows and bulls. Under the Second Five Year Plan a Goshala Development Scheme sought to convert suitable goshalas into cattle breeding-cum-milk production centres, supplying improved bulls and producing milk, while sending dry and old animals to gosadans. State gau seva commissions and animal welfare boards now support goshalas in many states. For the veterinarian, goshalas pose welfare problems of overcrowding and disease but can keep good indigenous bulls.
The Intensive Cattle Development Project was launched in 1964-65, in the Third Five Year Plan, to give an integrated package in compact areas, generally in milksheds supplying city milk schemes. Each project was planned to cover about one lakh breedable cows and buffaloes. Its package combined crossbreeding of non-descript cattle with exotic dairy breeds such as Jersey and Holstein-Friesian and upgrading of buffaloes with improved breeds such as Murrah, through artificial insemination; feed and fodder development; disease control and veterinary cover; and organised milk collection and marketing linked to dairy plants, sometimes with credit for purchase of animals. Linking production with marketing was its main advance over the Key Village Scheme.
ICDPs and key village units were later absorbed into newer programmes, notably the National Project for Cattle and Buffalo Breeding launched in 2000-01, which reorganised breeding through state livestock development boards, frozen semen and trained inseminators, and later into the Rashtriya Gokul Mission.
Operation Flood was the dairy development programme of the National Dairy Development Board, launched in 1970. The NDDB had been set up in 1965 at Anand, Gujarat, under Dr Verghese Kurien, to replicate across India the cooperative model of the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union, which began in 1946. Operation Flood was initially financed by the sale in India of skim milk powder and butter oil donated by the European Economic Community through the World Food Programme, later supported by the World Bank. Its objectives were to increase milk production, raise rural incomes and provide fair prices to consumers, by linking rural milk producers with urban markets through a national milk grid.
The programme ran in three phases. Phase I, from 1970 to 1981, linked 18 major milksheds to the four metropolitan markets of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Phase II, from 1981 to 1985, expanded to 136 milksheds and around 290 urban markets. Phase III, from 1985 to 1996, consolidated and extended the network, strengthened cooperative societies and increased emphasis on animal health, feed, artificial insemination and research. The programme is often called India's White Revolution, and India became the world's largest milk producer in the late 1990s.
The Anand pattern is a three-tier cooperative structure: village dairy cooperative societies of producers at the base, which collect milk twice a day and pay by fat and solids-not-fat content; district cooperative milk unions, which own processing plants and provide inputs such as feed, artificial insemination and veterinary services; and state cooperative milk marketing federations, which market the products. Producers own the institutions, payment is regular and quality-based, and inputs come through the same structure; coverage is uneven across states. For extension, the village cooperative is a ready group with twice-daily contact.
Indian livestock development is now delivered through a set of centrally sponsored and central sector schemes run by the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying with state governments, whose names, components and funding shares are revised in each finance cycle. The main families are as follows. The Rashtriya Gokul Mission, launched in 2014, aims at development and conservation of indigenous bovine breeds and genetic upgradation of the bovine population, through artificial insemination coverage, sex-sorted semen, progeny testing, embryo transfer and in vitro fertilisation, and breed conservation centres. The National Livestock Mission, launched in 2014-15, covers small ruminants, pigs, poultry, feed and fodder, entrepreneurship, and risk management including livestock insurance. The Livestock Health and Disease Control programme supports vaccination against economically important diseases, control of other diseases, mobile veterinary units and veterinary hospitals and dispensaries; the National Animal Disease Control Programme for foot-and-mouth disease and brucellosis, launched in 2019, aims at control and eventual eradication of these diseases through mass vaccination of identified animals. Dairy schemes include the National Programme for Dairy Development and the Dairy Processing and Infrastructure Development Fund, and infrastructure is supported through the Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund. Earlier, the National Dairy Plan Phase I, implemented through NDDB with World Bank support, focused on productivity through breeding and nutrition and on village milk procurement.
Because the details change, an officer should always work from the current scheme guidelines of the Department and the state, which state eligibility, unit costs, subsidy and the share between centre, state and beneficiary.
The livestock census of India is conducted every five years and counts livestock and poultry by species, breed, sex, age and ownership. The first was conducted in 1919-20; the 20th was conducted in 2019. Its data are the basis for planning schemes, estimating feed and fodder needs, allocating vaccines and calculating breed populations, and the later censuses have collected breed-wise data on indigenous and exotic animals and household-level data. Enumeration is by state animal husbandry departments, coordinated nationally.
Livestock insurance protects the owner against loss from death of an animal by disease or accident, and sometimes permanent total disability. A policy normally requires identification of the animal by an ear tag or similar mark, a veterinary health certificate and valuation at the time of insurance, and a claim requires a post-mortem report, the identification tag and timely intimation to the insurer. Government schemes have subsidised the premium for farmers, with higher subsidy for poorer and scheduled categories and limits on the number of animals per household; the exact premium rate, subsidy share and animal limit depend on the current scheme guideline and the state. Farmers adopt insurance only if they trust that claims will be paid, so prompt tagging, certification and post-mortem reports matter.
Livestock extension in South Asia is pluralistic. The state animal husbandry department, through veterinary hospitals, dispensaries, mobile veterinary units, artificial insemination centres and paravets, is the largest provider; its staff combine clinical service with extension, and clinical work tends to crowd extension out. State veterinary and agricultural universities have directorates of extension education, run training, publish literature and conduct frontline demonstrations. Krishi Vigyan Kendras under ICAR, coordinated through Agricultural Technology Application Research Institutes, carry out on-farm testing, frontline demonstrations and vocational training at district level. The Agricultural Technology Management Agency coordinates extension across line departments at district level and supports farmer interest groups. Cooperatives, NGOs and private input firms also advise, with varying independence.
Community-based animal health workers, trained members of the community who provide basic animal health services and advice under veterinary supervision, have become important where veterinarians are few. In South Asia women community livestock workers, such as the Pashu Sakhis promoted under rural livelihood missions in India, reach women livestock keepers directly. Their work needs clear legal standing, supervision and referral links to veterinarians.
Internationally, extension thinking has moved from a linear transfer-of-technology model, in which research generates technology, extension transfers it and farmers adopt it, towards an agricultural innovation systems view, in which farmers, researchers, traders, input suppliers, policy-makers and service providers jointly generate and use knowledge. Approaches include farmer field schools, farmer-to-farmer extension, demand-driven and partly privatised services in which farmers pay for some advice, and pluralistic systems with many providers. The Training and Visit system, widely funded by the World Bank in the 1970s and 1980s, was largely abandoned because it was costly, top-down and hard to sustain.
As a BVSc student you will be asked to plan and run a village adoption or rural veterinary extension posting. Use this subject to do a PRA in your first week: draw a social and resource map with the villagers, a seasonal calendar of fodder and disease and a daily activity clock that shows who milks and feeds. Then write one working objective, choose a method demonstration and a result demonstration that fit it, and plan how you will measure knowledge before and after with a simple knowledge index. In examinations, learn the exact meanings of the adoption stages, adopter categories, communication models, discussion formats and Indian programme dates, which are asked repeatedly.
Five years into practice in a block hospital or a dairy union, extension is the part of the job that decides whether your clinical work spreads. You run health and infertility camps, vaccination drives and calf rallies; you speak at cooperative meetings; you certify animals for insurance and write post-mortem reports for claims; and you explain scheme eligibility to farmers through the gram sabha. Identify the early adopters and opinion leaders in each village and work through them, schedule meetings when women can attend, use one-idea posters and short videos in the local language, and keep records that show practice change, not just the number of camps held.
With twenty-five years of service you are a deputy director, a union's head of field operations or a KVK head, responsible for district programmes. Your decisions are which villages and herds to target, how to combine the state department, cooperatives, KVKs, community livestock workers and private providers, and how to report results honestly. Plan with panchayats and cooperatives using real baseline data from the livestock census and your own surveys, set measurable objectives at the practice-change and end-result levels of Bennett's hierarchy, and insist on comparison areas so that results can be attributed. Protect extension time from being swallowed by targets for inputs distributed.
A researcher with long field experience studies why livestock innovations spread or fail and designs better delivery systems. Typical work includes measuring adoption and its determinants with validated scales and indices, evaluating schemes with baseline and comparison groups or randomised designs, analysing technology and extension gaps from demonstrations, studying gender and social exclusion in access to veterinary services, testing ICT-based advisory services, and applying innovation-systems analysis to dairy and small-ruminant value chains. You would also advise ministries on reforming extension towards pluralistic, demand-led services and on legal frameworks for community animal health workers, and you would train the next generation of extension scientists in rigorous evaluation.
This manual does not give current subsidy rates, unit costs, premium shares or animal limits for Indian schemes, because they change with each scheme revision and vary by state; readers must use the current Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying and state guidelines. It does not give livestock census totals or Operation Flood Phase III outcome figures, because exact values differ between sources. The exact number of villages or cows per key village unit is left out for the same reason. Coverage of extension systems outside South Asia is general rather than country by country, and statistical methods for adoption research, such as scale construction and regression models, are named rather than taught.
Original practice questions written to the syllabus and pattern of the exams named in each question's examTags. They are not past papers and do not reproduce any board's questions.
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