Krushi-Go-Vidhya
Overview
Krushi-Go-Vidhya is a Gujarati-language monthly farm magazine published from Anand in central Gujarat. It is the farm magazine of the agricultural university at Anand, today Anand Agricultural University, and it carries research-based agricultural information to the farmers of Gujarat in their own language. Its name joins the Gujarati words for agriculture and for cattle with the word for knowledge or learning, and the title states its purpose directly: knowledge about crops and livestock, delivered to the people who raise both. The magazine is also rendered in university documents as Krushigovidya, and its publication unit appears in the university's own staff listings as the Krushi-Go-Vidya Publication Unit, under the Directorate of Extension Education at Anand.
The magazine belongs to a long Indian tradition of university farm publishing, in which agricultural universities print a regular magazine in the regional language so that findings from research stations and laboratories reach cultivators in a usable form. Among the farm magazines of Gujarat, Krushi-Go-Vidhya holds a particular distinction, recorded in an academic study of the magazine itself: it is the oldest farm magazine in the state.
History and Founding in 1948
Krushi-Go-Vidhya has been published since 1948. The academic study of the magazine, preserved in the national agricultural thesis repository Krishikosh, records that it was published by Gujarat Agricultural University from its Anand campus from that year, and describes it as the oldest farm magazine in Gujarat. The date is significant: the magazine began within a year of Indian independence, at a time when Anand was already emerging as a centre of agricultural education and cooperative dairying in the Charotar region, and when printed farm literature was one of the few reliable ways to carry new agricultural knowledge beyond the research station.
The institutional name behind the magazine has changed as Gujarat's agricultural university system has been reorganised over the decades. The 1948 title was later published under Gujarat Agricultural University, and Anand Agricultural University, which was carved out of the former Gujarat Agricultural University for the central Gujarat region, lists the magazine's monthly publication among its activities. Throughout those changes of parent institution, the magazine itself, its Anand base and its Gujarati farming readership have remained constant, giving it an unbroken place in the state's farm extension system for more than seven decades.
Publisher and Editorial Home
The magazine is produced within the extension education machinery of Anand Agricultural University. The university's own directory of extension staff lists an Associate Extension Educationist attached to the Krushi-Go-Vidya Publication Unit in the Directorate of Extension Education at Anand, with the university's Anand address, 388110. A university overview of its mass media work similarly assigns the publication of the monthly farm magazine Krushigovidya to its Centre for Communication Network at Anand, alongside radio talks by university scientists, television talks, press meets, farm advisory services and the publication of research recommendations for farmers in Gujarati.
That placement explains the magazine's character. It is not a commercial farming title chasing advertising, but an official extension publication, written and edited by extension specialists whose wider job is to transfer technology from the university to the field. The same directorate that publishes the magazine also runs training centres, advisory services and farmer programmes, and the magazine functions as the printed arm of that system, reaching farmers whom training programmes cannot gather in one place.
Language and Subject Area
Krushi-Go-Vidhya is published in Gujarati, the language of its farming readers. The choice of the regional language is fundamental to its mission: the academic study of farm magazines notes that many farm magazines are published in India's major languages precisely because research findings must be readable, or readable aloud within a family, to be used. In Gujarat at the time of that study, about sixteen farm magazines were being published in the local language, among them titles devoted to crops, cotton, cattle and general farming, and Krushi-Go-Vidhya stood at the head of that list by age.
Its subject area spans the whole of the farm. The double subject in its title, crops and cattle, reflects the mixed farming of Gujarat, where crop cultivation and dairy animal keeping are carried on together in most farm households. Its pages carry the university's agricultural information on crop production and animal husbandry alike, timed, as a later study of its subscribers put it, to the needs of the farming season, since the information published in the magazine is prepared for farmers according to need and time.
Purpose and Editorial Approach
The stated object of the magazine, as recorded in the study of it, is to disseminate agricultural information among the farmers of Gujarat, to increase their agricultural knowledge and thereby to increase their agricultural production. That simple chain, information to knowledge to production, is the classic logic of agricultural extension, and the magazine pursues it through regular monthly publication, which the same study identifies as the reason monthly farm magazines are popular for spreading modern agricultural information: they arrive regularly, they can be read at leisure, and they can be kept for future reference.
The study also sets out the three services farm magazines perform for their readers: they inform, they guide and they entertain. In practice that means Krushi-Go-Vidhya combines news of new varieties and methods with step-by-step guidance a farmer can act on, presented in a form meant to be read rather than filed away. Articles are written by or drawn from the university's scientists and extension specialists, so the magazine acts as a printed meeting point between the research system and the farming community it serves.
What Subscribers Actually Use
Unusually for a farm magazine, the practical effect of Krushi-Go-Vidhya on its readers has been studied and published. A research paper by extension specialists of Anand Agricultural University, published in the Gujarat Journal of Extension Education, surveyed the magazine's subscribers on how they used the agricultural information it carried on their own farms. The study found that the great majority of subscribers applied the selected information in their farming, naming the topics they used most: high-yielding varieties, disease control methods, keeping farm accounts, applying fertilizer at the recommended dose, weed control methods, seed treatment and soil testing.
The same study profiles the readership it surveyed. The majority of subscribers were in the young to middle-aged groups, educated up to graduate and postgraduate level, were large farmers with farming as their main occupation and annual incomes above a stated level, and the great majority showed a medium to high level of reading behaviour. The researchers also found that reading behaviour, cropping intensity and annual income were significantly connected with how much of the magazine's information subscribers put to use. For a directory reader, this research is the clearest available evidence of the magazine's role: it is read by practising, commercially active farmers who treat it as a working input to farm decisions, not as general reading.
Circulation and Subscription in the Record
The academic study of the magazine preserves a rare run of circulation figures. Its table of monthly average published copies from 1981-82 to 1993-94 shows the magazine printing between roughly 3,800 and 9,400 copies a month across those years: 4,800 copies a month in 1981-82, rising to a peak of 9,434 in 1989-90, and standing at about 3,878 copies a month in 1993-94. These are historical figures from the period the study covers, and they show a substantial, sustained print run for a regional-language university magazine.
The same source records how inexpensive the magazine was kept for its readers: in 1993-94 the annual subscription rate was twenty rupees, with life membership at 150 rupees for an individual and 200 rupees for an institution. Those prices, far below commercial magazine rates, reflect the magazine's status as a publicly supported extension tool, priced for uptake by farmers and village institutions rather than for profit. Current subscription terms are a matter for the university's extension directorate, and readers should confirm them with Anand Agricultural University rather than rely on the historical figures.
Role in Gujarat's Farm Knowledge System
Krushi-Go-Vidhya's importance rests on three things together: its age, its language and its source. As Gujarat's oldest farm magazine, published continuously since 1948, it has carried university knowledge to successive generations of the same farming families. Published in Gujarati, it removes the language barrier that keeps much agricultural research, written in English, away from the field. And as a university publication, its contents carry the authority of tested research recommendations rather than commercial claims, which is why extension researchers have used the magazine itself as a subject of study when measuring how agricultural information is adopted.
It also sits within a wider media system that the university operates from Anand, including radio and television talks, advisory services, training centres, an agricultural technology information centre and Gujarati research recommendations for farmers and extension workers. In that system the magazine is the durable element: a broadcast is heard once, but a printed monthly can be kept, re-read at the season when it matters, and passed between neighbours.
How to Read and Subscribe
Krushi-Go-Vidhya is obtained through Anand Agricultural University at Anand, Gujarat, whose official website is aau.in. The magazine's publication unit functions under the university's Directorate of Extension Education, and enquiries about subscription and availability are properly directed to that directorate or to the university's extension and information centres, which handle the university's publications and farmer services. Because the subscription rates preserved in published studies date from the 1990s, prospective subscribers should ask the university for the current annual and life subscription terms.
For researchers and librarians, the magazine is also a documented source in its own right: published studies of its content, circulation and subscriber behaviour are available through agricultural research repositories such as Krishikosh and the Gujarat Journal of Extension Education, and they provide the most detailed public record of how this Gujarati monthly has served the state's farmers since 1948.
