Challenges in Attracting and Retaining Rural Youth in the Near Future in Agriculture

Abstract

Currently, Indian agriculture is facing variety of emerging challenges in spite of the assembly boom, the concerns have shifted from production to more complicated, subtle and multifaceted issues. A number of the contemporary problems in Indian agriculture are land fragmentation, labour shortage, depletion of natural resources, global climate change, low profitability, competition due to market liberalization, nutrition and gender issues etc. Under such circumstances the agriculture sector needs new ideas, innovations, rebranding and revitalization to combat these prevailing challenges .Generally youth is willing to adopt new ideas and technologies and thus they will easily transform this status of farming. The youth might be the perfect catalyst to change the poor image of persons involved in farming, especially within the rural communities given their greater possibility to adapt new ideas, concept and technology which are all important to change the way farming is practiced and perceived. This scenario of adjusting agriculture in India demands the energy and vitality of youth. India being the youngest nation within the world has massive youth resource to supply to agriculture sector but unfortunately, youth participation in agriculture is declining. With this scenario, this paper aims to debate some pertinent issues in present context like importance of youth involvement and reasons for growing interest of youth in farming sector, channelizing enormous youth workforce of the country into agriculture, strategies for attracting and retaining youth in agro-based rural enterprises and institutional efforts to leverage youth for agriculture.