Evolving Agriculture Research Plan in Hill Agriculture: a Participatory Tool Based Exercise in West Bengal, India

The traditional agriculture research plan is top down oriented. The agriculture research plans are normally loaded with high dose of command approach and subsidy orientation to the passive farming community who are considered to having homogenous micro farming realities. The assumptions are wrong is known to everybody for quite long time. Counter evidence to that paradigm of command approach is the participatory tool driven planning which accommodates micro climate variations while developing research plan for agriculture interventions. The Agriculture in Darjeeling hills of West Bengal, India, had witnessed many top-down oriented research plans and its suboptimal implementation for quite a long time. The situations are now being reversed with the grassroots based application of participatory tools in preparing micro plan for farming community who are otherwise constrained on many counts. This book deals with participatory tool based research plan basing on micro climatic requirement which will benefit the research practitioners and grassroots agriculture extension workers as practical handbook.