Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

240 MEGHANA KELKAR
upon. In the main, the local knowledges of people are deemed inferior
and not worthy of consideration.
Institutional and Organisational Problems
National and state funding towards agricultural research and extension
is increasingly becoming a constraint as agriculture is no longer a priority
sector (Mruthyunjaya and Ranjitha 1998). There has been a major change
in research priorities and an increasing push towards public-private partnership
in agricultural research, extension and education under the regime
of globalisation and the WTO (Easter et al.1989). Instead of institutional
reforms involving a transformation of the rules/norms that govern agricultural
policy, research and extension organisations, there have been
cosmetic changes in the organisational structure (Raina 2003). These are
some of the pertinent problems that are being faced by the agricultural
network in India, and Maharashtra is no exception to this.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND WAYS FORWARD
Considering the institutional philosophy of the agricultural network, the
integration of gender and equity concerns on well-founded feminist principles
seems a daunting prospect. The expectation that the stimulus for
‘integration’ can be generated within the system solely by increasing the
number of women in the network is ill-founded: ‘Access is not enough to
change the gender asymmetries, though it is clearly crucial to the process
of change in the forms of education and in the uses of technology’ (Bourque
and Warren 1990: 10). In the absence of conscious efforts to infuse gender
sensitivity as a core component in agricultural education, it is erroneous
to assume that the neo-entrant women professionals would automatically
be sensitive towards these issues.
Thus, as mentioned earlier, the mainstreaming of gender and equity
concerns in the agricultural network requires politicised strategic efforts
with a two-pronged strategy, the first being strong advocacy efforts at
the policy levels to keep the issue on the anvil. These advocacy efforts
should conceptualise women farmers as equal citizens with their own
aspirations of and agendas for progress, as well as their right to access a