Make pass-outs ‘work ready’, OUAT told

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Bhubaneswar: The state government has asked the Odisha University of Agriculture & Technology (OUAT) to make its courses more industry-specific and sustainable growth-oriented with the aim of making the pass-out students ‘work ready’.
The prodding came in a high-level meeting held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi at the Secretariat here Monday.
Padhi advised the university authority to make its courses more sustainable growth-oriented keeping in view the changing climatic conditions. He also advised to make these more industry-specific so that the students are ‘work ready’ when they leave the university. The meeting also decided that the students of OUAT would have real time practice with farmers at GP and village level as part of their course. The Chief Secretary asked to scale up the quality of teaching and learning to create more entrepreneurs than job seekers
Further, Padhi advised the university authority to make the Krushi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) more vibrant and farmer need-oriented. They should operate kike a bridge between the laboratory and the field. The innovative research projects undertaken in KVKs should be made specific outcome-oriented leading to actual filed level benefit for sustainable agriculture, he said.
Agriculture & Farmers’ Empowerment secretary Sourav Garg, who was also present in the meeting, said it deliberated on quality enhancement in research, training, making the OUAT course more industry-specific and adding new frontiers like climate change and environment, landscape architecture, conservation, wild life management, man-animal conflict management and IT applications in agriculture. The details will be worked out soon and steps would be expedited to implement those, the secretary said.
According to sources, the extension activities of OUAT are mostly being carried forward through 33 KVKs in the state. Each district has at least one KVK. Apart from that there are additional KVKs in the districts like Mayurbhanj, Sundargarh and Ganjam. About six scientists in each KVK lead the research and extension work.