Technical Advisory Committee meeting of ICAR-Network Program on Precision Agriculture (NePPA)

10^{th – 11th} January 2023, Barrackpore

ICAR-Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute, Barrackpore organized the First Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting of the ICAR-Network Program on Precision Agriculture during January 10-11, 2023. The program is monitored by a technical advisory committee which is constituted of twelve eminent experts from ICAR, IITs, and Universities.

The Chairman of the Steering Committee, Dr. Suresh Kumar Chaudhari, Deputy Director General (Natural Resource Management) joined the meeting virtually on 11^th January 2023 and spoke about the future prospects of program and ICAR expectations. He encouraged the team members to dedicate and come out with viable solutions implementable to the field.  

During the inaugural session on 10^th January, Prof. J. Adinarayana, IIT Bombay, and Member TAC emphasized that the focus should be on the selection of the right technology to solve the problems.  He also urged to prepare the benchmark dataset and that should be available to the public in future. 

Dr. Anil Rai, ADG (ICT), ICAR, and Coordinator of ICAR-NePPA program briefed about the program formulation and its funding pattern. He emphasized that critical advises should come out from this meeting to improve the action plans as well as the quality of the program output.

Dr. Rabi N. Sahoo, Program leader (ICAR-NePPA) presented the entire NePPA program concepts, its objectives and future prospective.  He briefed about the action plans of each objective and the progress so far. 

Earlier, Dr. B. K. Das, Director, ICAR-CIFRI delivered welcome address.

TAC members suggested valuable points. Their suggestions majorly focused on evaluation of existing technology before new development, emphasis to achieve quantifiable output, integration of technologies, development of acoustic devices for sensing pest and diseases, development of robust forecasting model, appropriate site selection for research etc. They also suggested that ICAR may directly link to the startups to develop the concrete outputs from the program

PIs of sixteen ICAR institutes presented their project progress followed by thorough discussions.

Other team members of each partner institute joined virtually and participated actively in the meeting.

(Source: ICAR-Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), Barrackpore)