An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Agricultural Extension Services: The Role of Public and Private Sectors in Balochistan

The role of both the public and private sectors in the context of agricultural extension services needs to be analyzed referring to their effectiveness in extension work and their relative importance in changing the attitude of the farmers to adopt new technologies and improved practices in agriculture of the province. The role of change actors mainly has to be seen not in all but few dimensional changes such as; switching from an old quality/variety of an input or operation to the new one, the length of time span of the change adoption and the role of the change actor in introducing a new technology and/or improved practice. The findings coming at surface in the result of the research analyses indicate that unlike the extension workers of the provincial agriculture department, no visible organized formal institutional cadre of extension workers exists in the private sector in the province. The informal change agents in the private sector; elders, shopkeepers, fellow farmers, progressive farmers, under no planned strategy are playing an important role.