We can't centrally control mushrooming of Agricultural Institutions: ICAR Dy Director General
A lot of opportunities are coming up in the agri sector as there is a lot of demand for blockchain, supply chain, value addition, opportunities around online delivery, developing technologies to connect producers with consumers and so on.
Dr R.C. Agrawal, Deputy Director General (Agricultural Education), ICAR, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, which is the apex body for coordinating, guiding, and managing research and education in agriculture in the country. Dr Agrawal in conversation with Shiksha discusses the need for a regulatory body to check mushrooming of agricultural colleges and various career opportunities emerging in the field, besides other topics related to the sector.
Q. How do you look at the growth or mushrooming of agricultural colleges across the country? How is ICAR ensuring the quality of agricultural education?
A. The mushrooming of agri colleges will have to be looked at by state governments as it is their jurisdiction, our role is only to look after the quality and standard of education being offered and to set the standards of agriculture education. We cannot centrally control the mushrooming of private universities.
Q. Is there a need for a regulatory body to monitor and regulate agriculture education in the country?
A. The National Education Policy talks of having a single regulatory body for the higher education sector instead of multiple bodies, we are also hopeful that once the Higher Education Council of India, or HECI, becomes a reality and agricultural education becomes part of it we will see improvement in quality of institutions.
Q. What are the new jobs and career opportunities coming up in the agri sector?
A. A lot of opportunities are coming up in the agri sector as there is a lot of demand for blockchain, supply chain, value addition, opportunities around online delivery, developing technologies to connect producers with consumers and so on. Helping farmers with knowledge of resource mobilization, and technological interventions for better yield, there are vast areas where people are required.
Q. Is ICAR working on providing new-age courses in these areas like supply chain, and blockchain, or is it revamping the existing programmes?
A. We have revamped our postgraduate and PhD level programmes as per the NEP 2020 by including the latest research and areas of research. We have included Artificial Intelligence, IoT based solutions, there are areas in genomics. We held national-level deliberation with stakeholders and based on that we have revamped the curriculum.
For the undergraduate programmes also we have received the first draft of the recommendations and as the NEP suggests multiple entry and exit options, we are also planning to introduce that.
Q. ICAR has recently launched a blended learning platform, how is this going to help the students?
A. Earlier there was no concept of online education or blended learning, but COVID taught us a lot as we realized if everything is locked this would delay the academic session and other related activities. Through this blended learning system, we are trying to digitize every course content which is in printed form so that students can access it anytime anywhere.
We also explored through these various other activities which are not part of the curriculum but would be helpful for the students like some kind of training or other modules. We also look to encourage universities to upload their course content online so that students from other universities will also be able to access them. Right now we have more than 4000 lectures from the best teachers uploaded on this website.
Q. Is it part of the SWAYAM platform or a separate structure?
A. This is not part of SWAYAM, it is totally different but similar to SWAYAM, dedicated only to agriculture education.
Q. How is Agricultural education different from regular university education?
A. It is a different system because here we focus not just on education but also on research and extension, in the sense that every student of our courses is attached to villages, they interact with farmers. He has to have hands-on training, he needs practical exposure.
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Abhay an alumnus of IIMC and Delhi University, has over a decade long experience of reporting on various beats of journalism. During his free time he prefers listening to music or play indoor and outdoor games.