Extension and Community Development Questions and Answers

Answer: C

An out of school system of education for rural women (and rural people generally) is extension.

Extension education is defined as an informal, out-of-school system of education that takes useful knowledge on farming, home science, health and nutrition to rural families where they live and work, helping them to help themselves.

Management, participation and communication are processes or tools used within extension. Communication, for instance, is the means by which extension messages are carried, but none of them is the educational system itself.

Answer: C

Non-formal education is learner centred.

It is organised around the needs, interests and circumstances of the learners: timing, place, content and pace are flexible, so working adults, school drop-outs and rural women can take part. The learner, not a fixed syllabus, decides what is relevant.

'Reader' centred is not a description of any education system. Youth and gender name particular target groups that non-formal programmes may serve, but the defining feature of non-formal education is its focus on the learner.

Answer: D

Informal education happens by chance at the place of work.

Informal education is lifelong, incidental learning from daily experience: from family, friends, the media and work. It has no planned curriculum, teacher or examination, so the learning happens by chance wherever the person lives and works.

The lecture, the classroom and the examination hall are all settings of formal education, where learning is planned and organised, which is why they are wrong here.

Answer: B

A person who organises and runs a business enterprise to make profit is an entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur identifies an opportunity, brings together land, labour and capital, organises production and bears the risk of the enterprise in return for profit. Entrepreneurship development is a major theme of home science extension for women.

A seller and a merchant buy and sell goods, which is trading rather than organising an enterprise. 'A businessman' is a general term for anyone in business; the specific term for the one who starts the enterprise and bears its risk is entrepreneur.

Answer: D

SGSY is a programme for the promotion of self-employment.

The Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, launched in April 1999, helped rural poor families rise above the poverty line through self-employment. It organised them into self-help groups and supported income-generating activities with bank credit and government subsidy. It was restructured as the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (Aajeevika) in 2011.

Wage employment was the aim of separate schemes such as the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana and later MGNREGA. Infrastructure and community development are not its purpose.

Answer: C

The basic purpose of Panchayati Raj is democratic decentralization.

The Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) recommended a three-tier system of elected bodies at village, block and district level so that power and responsibility for local development would pass to the people themselves. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992 gave these bodies constitutional status.

Panchayats may levy some local taxes and run employment schemes, but these are functions, not the basic purpose. Law and order remains with the state government and the police.

Answer: A

Non-formal education aims at skill based and socially useful learning.

It is organised for people outside the formal system, such as school drop-outs, working adults and rural women, and its content is chosen for immediate use in their work and life: functional literacy, vocational skills, health and nutrition.

Theory with practicals and academic learning describe formal schooling. Distance learning is a mode of delivery that can serve formal courses as well, so it is not the aim of non-formal education.

Answer: C

The Community Development Programme started on 2nd October, 1952.

It was launched on Gandhi Jayanti in 1952 in 55 project areas, with help from the Ford Foundation, to bring about the all-round development of rural life through people's participation. The National Extension Service followed on 2 October 1953.

1950 is the year the Planning Commission was set up and the First Five Year Plan was being prepared, and by 1964 the programme had been extended across the country, so neither of those dates marks its start.

Answer: D

'Scientific evaluation' is not one of the types of evaluation of an extension programme.

Extension programmes are classed by who evaluates. In self-evaluation the workers judge their own work; internal evaluation is done by the agency running the programme; external evaluation is done by an outside agency or expert. Evaluation is also described by timing as pre, ongoing and post evaluation.

Every evaluation should be done in a systematic, scientific way, but 'scientific' is a quality of the method, not one of the recognised types.

Answer: A

Method demonstration works on the principle of learning by doing.

In extension, a method demonstration shows a group how to carry out a new practice step by step, such as seed treatment or preparing a weaning food, and then has members practise it themselves. Extension textbooks state its principle as learning by doing.

'Seeing is believing' is the principle of the result demonstration, which shows the outcome of a practice. 'Learning by believing' and 'learning by teaching' are not recognised extension principles, and 'seeing and doing' describes the activity rather than naming the principle textbooks give.