Six scientists from north-east get ICAR award for work in agriculture

<p class="p1">Six agricultural scientists of three northeastern states – Tripura, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh — were awarded ICAR's national award for their outstanding innovation in farming and boosting the agricultural economy in the region, officials said yesterday.

A senior official of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) said that besides six scientists, two Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVK) in Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur and three farmers of Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya received the ICAR awards on Thursday for their exceptional feats in agricultural and farming sectors of the region.

Four scientists — Lopamudra Sahoo, Gulab Singh Yadav, Chandan Debnath and Basant Kumar Kandpal, who are associated with the ICAR research complex in Tripura received the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed Award and Swami Sahajan and Saraswati Award for the year 2019-20. Scientist Amit Kumar, who is currently associated with the ICAR research complex in Meghalaya and Nangsol Dolma Bhutia, Assistant Professor of Central Agricultural University at Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh have received the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for P.G. Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Agricultural and Allied Sciences.

The ICAR on its foundation day has been recognizing and rewarding the institutions, scientists, teachers, farmers and agricultural journalists every year for their outstanding performance in research and innovation on agriculture. On the occasion of the 92nd foundation day on Thursday, Minister of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar gave these awards at a ceremony organized on a virtual platform.

ICAR's Tripura research complex scientist Sahoo said that for the past 10 years, a team of scientists, led by her, is striving hard for socio-economical upliftment of tribal farmers of Tripura through inter-disciplinary research and development in the field of integrated farming, conservation agriculture, composite fish culture and resource management.

"Our efforts led to the remarkable socio-economic transformation of more than 11,000 tribal farmers of Tripura using augmentation of cropping intensity from 160 per cent to 250 per cent, fish productivity from 0.5-1.0 MT per hectares to 2.0 MT per hectares. Moreover, employment generation was increased from 60 man-days to 300 man-days and each farmer's annual income was raised from Rs 20,000 to Rs 80,000," she said.

Sahoo said that the capacity of tribal farmers to cope up with climate-induced perturbations has significantly improved applying the ICAR technologies and it brought hope for almost two lakh, tribal farmers of Tripura, for livelihood empowerment adopting improved farming.</p>.