Dr.Trilochan Mohapatra, Hon’ble Secretary DARE and Director General, ICAR visited ICAR-ATARI Kolkata today as a part of his joint visit to the states of West Bengal and Assam. While welcoming the Dignitaries to the institute, Dr. P. P. Pal, Principal Scientist, ICAR-ATARI Kolkata briefed about the history of the institute and the current scenario of the division/ creation of existing/ new zones across eastern India. Dr. S. K. Roy, Director, ICAR-ATARI Kolkata gave a quick account of salient achievements of the institute in terms of the mandated KVK activities, NICRA and recent mass awareness programmes etc.
During his interaction with the Scientists, Dr. Mohapatra took an account of the current position of KVKs of the zone and emphasized on the detailed documentation of the skill development trainings, their impact and handholding of the trainees by the KVKs for employment/ entrepreneurship development along with the farmer’s innovations, their validation by KVK and inspiration by the innovators/ entrepreneurs to others. He urged upon bringing out a compilation on details of OFTs and FLDs with identification of sources of technologies and transfer of identified suitable technologies to State Govt. departments. He appreciated the efforts made by the ICAR-ATARI and KVKs of Zone-II in involving the Ministers/ MPs/ MLAs in various KVK activities/ programmes and requested to continue the same in future to increase the visibility of the KVKs. Dr. Mohapatra informed about the categorization of KVKs and identification and finalization of performance indicators for the purpose by the month of July, 2016. He requested all the Scientists of ICAR-ATARI Kolkata to take up research on the socio-economic impact of technologies/ KVKs considering adoption and diffusion rates through employing various economic/ statistical matrix techniques available for impact analysis and to publish their research in journals having high citation index. He also emphasized on having mobile apps of all KVKs of the zone along with getting and promoting the institute-specific apps on fishery or rice depending on the information need of the target groups. He advised to increase the interaction with media for reaching out to more number of stakeholders. He also praised the cleanliness of the office premises of ICAR-ATARI, Kolkata and encouraged to maintain swachhta as a routine activity and added to have institute’s own compost unit for furthering the cleanliness drive.
A compilation entitled ‘Successful Farmers: KVK Endeavours’ was released by Hon’ble Secretary DARE and Director General, ICAR on the occasion.
On the occasion Dr. J. K. Jena, DDG (Fisheries), Directors, Station In-charges, Heads of Regional Stations of the nearby ICAR Institutes and all the Scientists and Staff members of ICAR-ATARI Kolkata were present in the event.
The meeting ended with thanks to the Chair.
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