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Preparing for New
Challenges
DINESH C. SHARMA
A key feature of the U.S.-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative
that takes it beyond the American-Indian cooperation of the Green
Revolution is public-private partnership. Industry and business can
help commercialize new technologies, reshape curricula to suit
today's needs and identify necessary research areas
Agriculture in India is facing several challenges. Productivity of
principal food crops has reached a plateau. Agricultural education
is stagnating. The farm business has become global. Issues such as
global warming and climate change, new pests and diseases, nutrition
security, food safety and agricultural trade regimes have emerged.
Agricultural practice is becoming technologically challenging and
trade in agricultural commodities has become complex.
The
need to reorient agricultural education to meet these new challenges
is being felt in India as well as in the United States. Of late,
policy makers have realized that these issues can be addressed only
through a paradigm shift in human resource development, research,
technology generation and dissemination.
This was the backdrop in which President George W. Bush and Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh spoke about enhanced cooperation in
agricultural education and research in the joint declaration they
signed in March 2006. This cooperation is based on the U.S.-India
Knowledge Initiative on Agricultural Education, Research, Service
and Commercial Linkages-known as Agricultural Knowledge Initiative
or AKI. The idea was to revive the two countries' historical ties in
agriculture, in the context of contemporary challenges. A key
feature of this initiative is public-private partnership, so that
private industry can be involved in all spheres of activity, from
education and research to commercialization of new technologies.
Industry could help reshape curricula to suit its requirements and
identify research areas that have the potential for rapid
commercialization.
The
initiative is being implemented through the AKI Board, co-chaired by
Ellen Terpstra, U.S. Deputy Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign
Agricultural Services, and Mangala Rai, Secretary of the Indian
Department of Agricultural Research and Education. The board has
representatives of private companies such as Wal-Mart, Monsanto, ITC
Limited and Venkateshwara Hatcheries. Eminent agricultural
scientists who ushered in the Green Revolution – Norman Borlaug and
M.S. Swaminathan – are honorary advisers. "The modus operandi for
this is partnership. It is not as if one is giving and the other is
taking," explains Rai.
Though the area of cooperation and
 collaboration
is wide ranging, it was decided to focus on four core areas
initially-agricultural education, food processing and marketing,
biotechnology and water management. Joint working groups have been
formed for each of these and detailed work plans are being
implemented. The idea is to take up projects that focus on knowledge
generation, sharing and exchange. The thinking is to let this
initiative retain an identity that is distinct from other ongoing
research programs.
The
work plans are being supported by a grant of Rs 3.5 billion (about
$80 million) from the Indian Government over a period of three
years. The American side has secured funding of $8 million in fiscal
year 2006, with a total of $24 million pledged through 2008.
"Through this initiative, we have the opportunity to facilitate
technology transfer, trade, and investment and bolster agricultural
research, education, and extension between our two countries," noted
Ambassador David C. Mulford at the end of the fourth meeting of the
AKI Board in New Delhi last November. "Part of our joint work is to
develop effective policy, regulatory, and institutional frameworks,
which will increase Indian agricultural productivity, help Indian
farmers prosper, and strengthen trade."
All
stakeholders involved
Indian agricultural universities are in the midst of a major
exercise to revise their curricula. For the first time, all
stakeholders, including private industry, have been involved in
order to improve the design and delivery of course content. This
exercise has now been thrown open to faculty from the U.S.
land-grant universities as well as industry representatives, under
the AKI. Their involvement is being sought to upgrade undergraduate
and post graduate courses at agricultural universities so that they
are able to meet the demands of farmers and industry.
India has 40 state agriculture universities, five deemed
universities (institutes and departments that have been granted
autonomy regarding coursework, admissions, fees, etc. by the
University Grants Commission), one central agricultural university
and more than 200 agricultural colleges. They churn out close to
14,000 graduates and 7,800 postgraduate and doctoral degree holders
every year. But there are 25,000 professors. Clearly the student to
faculty ratio is highly skewed due to a declining interest from
students.
"The situation can be corrected only through wide ranging reforms in
our education system, making it relevant to all the stakeholders,"
says S.L. Mehta, vice chancellor of Maharana Pratap University of
Agriculture and Technology in Udaipur. He was speaking at the AKI
Curriculum Development Workshop held in New Delhi on January 22-23,
2007. "The focus should shift to learning from teaching," says
Mehta, who heads a committee whose recommendations on agricultural
education are at the core of the review process.
The
panel has suggested increasing practical content in all courses,
from the present 36 percent to 50 percent, besides introducing new
courses in
 entrepreneurship
development, agribusiness, biotechnology, international trade,
patent regimes and environmental science in various disciplines. In
order to develop a cadre of skilled professionals, one to two years
of experiential learning has been recommended. Measures for faculty
improvement include mandatory training in national and international
institutes, rotation within the state agriculture university system
and exposure to industry. There should be movement of students and
faculty across states and freedom for students to select course
modules of their choice.
One
key way agricultural education can be made interesting as well as
relevant is to make classroom teaching interactive through the use
of new media techniques. These can also be used to promote
non-formal education and distance learning. Under AKI, this is being
done through sharing the American experience in curriculum
development, training and faculty exchange programs, endowment of
industry-sponsored chairs in Indian universities and workshops for
specific review and planning. "It is not that our curriculum is the
answer. But our system could offer India some help in terms of
course development, teaching methodologies, systems and procedures,
faculty training, etc.," said Ronnie Coffman, international
professor of plant breeding and director of international programs
at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York.
In
2006, 15 Indian scientists and researchers completed fellowships at
American universities on distance learning, bio-fuels, animal and
plant diseases, and biotechnology, under the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's (USDA's) Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural
Science and Technology Fellows Program. Another 12 Borlaug
fellowships are being given during 2007. Also, under the Cochran
Fellowship Program, 12 Indian experts will spend two weeks in the
United States to work in food processing and marketing. Also, the
USDA's National Agricultural Library and U.S. land-grant
universities have begun working with their Indian counterparts to
develop a plan to strengthen India's library and information
systems. Faculty and scientists will be trained to develop teaching
resources, using multimedia, Web-based technologies and training in
the transmission and retrieval of digital resources. The U.S.
National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges
has awarded five grants to American universities to work with Indian
partners on projects that focus on university curriculum
development, animal diseases, and trade.
Examples of joint initiatives focusing on experiential learning in
agricultural education already exist. Cornell University runs a
course on international agriculture development, in which students
of three Indian agricultural universities participate through a
virtual classroom. Lectures delivered in Cornell classrooms are
video streamed to students at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University,
Coimbatore; Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad;
and the University of Agriculture Sciences, Dharwad. The second
module of this course takes Indian students to the Cornell campus in
Ithaca, New York for two weeks. There they are exposed to farming
practices in rural America, functioning of community markets and
rural supply chains.
The
third module brings American students on a three-week trip to rural
India, during which 20 Indian and 35 American students visit farms,
markets and food processing centers. American students, along with
11faculty and staff from Cornell, came to India in January 2007 as
part of this course, while Indian students were in Cornell for two
weeks in October 2006.
"Visits to retail centers, post-harvest technology centers and
research farms expose Indian students to innovations that
 have taken
place in…food chain management in rural America," says K. Vijayaraghavan, founder director of Sathguru Management Consultants
in Hyderabad, which coordinates the exchange program. "On the other
hand, the visit of the Cornell students to India allows them to
understand...complex dimensions of improving the livelihood of rural
communities, the potential of integrating the food chain from farm
to market and the use of information and communication
technologies."
"And an American student would not be considered educated if he or
she has no understanding of what is happening here," says Coffman,
of Cornell. Most agro-business companies that recruit from
land-grant colleges ask students if they have any experience of
emerging economies like India and China.
Long-term spin-offs
The
Agricultural Knowledge Initiative has approval to run for three
years, but senior officials connected with it feel that it will lay
the foundation for several long-term joint projects that may have
spin-offs for other countries. The pigeon pea genomics project is
one example. In this project, the Hyderabad-based International Crop
Research Institute for Semi-arid Tropics is also participating,
besides several Indian agricultural research institutions and
universities, and the University of California-Davis. The pigeon pea
is one of the most important pulse crops in India, but is marked by
poor productivity due to lack of improved varieties, poor crop
management, pest attacks and disease prevalence. Deciphering the
genome of this crop holds the key to solving many of these problems.
Mangala Rai says more areas of cooperation will be included in the
initiative in future. "For example, nanotechnology has been flagged,
but we have not taken it up right away. We want to move step by
step. The focus is on four areas now." Under the biotechnology
component, a strategic alliance has been envisaged for training and
research on development of transgenic crops with resistance to
economically important viruses, tolerance to drought, heat and
salinity and micro-nutrient utilization efficiency. Rai feels that
the initiative has even greater significance for the future of
Indian agriculture than the Indo-U.S. partnership had in the Green
Revolution era
(Dinesh
C. Sharma is based in New Delhi and was selected by the Indian
Ministry of Science and Technology for the National Award for
Outstanding Effort in Science and Technology Communication in Print
Medium for 2006.)
11 April,
2007
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