The Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) situated in the State of Tamil Nadu in India is the pioneer among all the State Agricultural Universities of India in starting agriculture related distance learning programmes mainly for the benefit of the rural people constituting nearly 70 per cent of the total population with agriculture as their main occupation. The primary objectives of the distance education in agriculture are i) to improve the capacity building of rural farmers ii) to enable the Agricultural extension functionaries to update their knowledge on modern agricultural technologies and iii) to promote self-employment opportunities to the unemployed youth and women in agriculture and allied enterprises. The distance education approaches introduced by TNAU are: Farm School on AIR (FSA), Correspondence Courses, Audio and Video Cassette Lessons, Farm Telecasts and Printed Literature. Farm school on AIR was started in 1970s. It envisages broadcasting thirteen lessons in weekly intervals for three months, inviting answers from the registered listeners for questions asked and organising a one-day contact programme at the end for discussions and hands-on experience. Over 40,000 participants have been benefited so far.1. Dean (Agriculture), 2. Professor (Ag. Extension) and 3. Associate Professor (Ag. Economics), TNAU, Coimbatore, India.About 45 correspondence courses on varied Agricultural and allied subjects have been offered benefiting over 10,000 farmers. In each course, six lessons are mailed in fortnightly intervels, encouraging participants to answer the questions on each lesson. A three-days contact programme is also organised. Twenty five audio and seventy video cassette lessons on different issues and technologies in agriculture and allied enterprises have been distributed to the farmers for their personal use and also to Extension functionaries for their reference. More than 200 video modules on food production and processing technologies have been regularly telecasted through government and private television channels for educating the farming community. Printed farm magazines, newsletters, booklets, folders, pamphlets and others are brought out regularly in local language and also in English and issued to the farmers and others during various extension programmes. Impact studies have been conducted on the quality, relevance and utility of these programmes for improvement and modification. Special programmes have been taken up for educating the rural women in mushroom production, Broiler chicken production, Biofertilizer production and Biocontrol agents production, etc., to encourage the farm women for income generation for their family. |