Here is the announcement from Dean, Research and Development:
-------------------------------------
I am vey happy to inform you that this year IIT Kanpur is a recipient of the Agriculture Leadership Awards. These awards were given on 19th Sept, 2012 by the Hon'ble Union Minister of State for Agriculture Sri Harish Rawat at a function in New Delhi. Dr. M S Swaminathan was the Chairman of the Jury.
The
detailed citation of the award says "IIT Kanpur, a premier engineering
and research institute of the country, has successfully implemented
various agricultural projects with innovative technologies
and capacity building for sustainable development. Its Agropedia, a
semantically enabled agricultural knowledge management repository is a
first of its kind in Indian agriculture. The Institute’s yet another
product, Openagri, an open access agriculture research
repository, is a focused research space for hosting agriculture
documents. IIT-Kanpur’s Voice-Krishi Vigyan Kendra (vKVK), developed to
facilitate communication between extension personnel and farming
communities is presently reaching to the extension personnel
of 90 Krishi Vigyan Kendras and likely to be up scaled by ICAR to all
630 KVKs in the 12th Five Year Plan. KVK-Net and Agrotagger was also
developed by this prestigious institution."
Here is the link to agropedia
And here is the link to openagri
Finally, you can find more about Prof. T V Prabhakar at his homepage
-------------------------------------
I am vey happy to inform you that this year IIT Kanpur is a recipient of the Agriculture Leadership Awards. These awards were given on 19th Sept, 2012 by the Hon'ble Union Minister of State for Agriculture Sri Harish Rawat at a function in New Delhi. Dr. M S Swaminathan was the Chairman of the Jury.
The award is in recognition of the innovative knowledge management model in agriculture extension developed
by Prof. T V Prabhakar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering through several projects funded by ICAR, NAIP, BITCOE etc.
Other awardees include:
National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources
for exceptional work in conservation of
genetic resources
Nuziveedu Seeds Limited
for exceptional work in agriculture extension
Suguna Foods Limited for exceptional business leadership in poultry sector in India
Indian Oil Corporation Limited
for environment friendly products and farm sustainability
State of Kerala for innovative policy initiatives towards transforming horticulture
State of Madhya Pradesh for visionary leadership and exceptional performance in farm production
----------------------------------------------
Here is the link to agropedia
And here is the link to openagri
Finally, you can find more about Prof. T V Prabhakar at his homepage
Having recieved an award for technological advancements in agriculture is a plus. But i would still like to say that IIT Kanpur doesn't utilize its land efficiently. By this statement, i referred to the barren land behind hall-8 and the newly constructed hall-10. This land can be utilized for some agricultural purposes, The land can even be leased out to some farmers on a contractual basis. This will help get institute some funds and also save the land from becoming barren and hence is a win win situation for the institute. The land can be used at any time if required for further expansion of buildings in IIT Kanpur.
ReplyDeleteReally good to see IITK making its mark on Agriculture also and getting recognized for it.
ReplyDelete@Prateek A noble idea but I am not so sure about Implementation part of it. IIT is first and foremost a Science and Technology Institute. Humanities adds value to it and doesn't take too much resource also. An agricultural institute requires a different kind of focus. It is not a side activity that can easily merge within Ambit of IIT.
The utilization of land is a nice idea, but IITs simply don't have the bandwidth for it because of overstretched faculty and staff. Second, noble ideas such a contractual farming are open invitation for exploitation of legalities. In Hostels, IIT is unable to assure minimum wages for contract works in Mess because of practical limitations. Construction activities in institute have seen couple of accidents. And it is not because IITK isn't concerned but there are practical limitations on bandwidth.
Lets not lose our focus. Farming is beyond ambit of IITK and it can get raise far better funding through promoting Entrepreneurship in Technology areas itself. E-cell of IITK is a really good initiative in that regard.
@Prof Sanghi :
ReplyDeleteThis blog is closes social source that I have seen about finding happenings in Institute through Official channels. Can we take this one step forward and establish a facebook/google plus page, and start publishing the same. IIT Guwahati has a fb page, IITD has a google plus page. IITK Alumni Associations Facebook page has membership of 9325 and quite a few regular readers .. A FB/Twitter page publishing official news will be really welcome .. Though I haven't used any, but there are sites/ free services available which allows managing all social media accounts from a single place. ROI (return on investment) will be great from these initiatives.
@Umesh, We certainly are very weak in leveraging social networking. I do see DRPG office making some efforts in posting at least big news on the FB page, but we need to do much more. And frankly, the issue is a larger one. I find IIT Kanpur to be somewhat conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies - whether it is something as simple as video recording of lectures, use of a learning management system, online student feedback, not to mention MOOCs and other interesting things happening in the world around us. Ever since the internal newsgroups have become defunct, we haven't replaced them with an internal blogging site. And I have no idea how to encourage smarter technology adoption on campus.
ReplyDelete@Prof. Sanghi, a really helpful blog. Would it be possible to know the faculty and students involved in the agricultural research and products especially eKVK. ?
ReplyDelete@Unknown, the blog gives the name of the faculty member, Prof. T V Prabhakar. You may contact him for more information.
Delete