Vice President asks researchers to come up with innovations to solve farmers’ problems

Need to end the exploitation of farmers by middlemen, VP wants higher education system to drive innovation and start-up ecosystem in the country.

August 18, 2020, New Delhi: The Vice-President of India Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu today virtually announced Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) 2020. Union Minister of Education, Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Minister of State for Education and Shri Sanjay Shamrao Dhotre also graced the occasion. Secretary (Higher Education), Shri Amit Khare, Chairman, AICTE, Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, ARIIA Evaluation Committee, Dr. BVR Mohan Reddy, and Chief Innovation Officer, Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell, Dr. Abhay Jere were also present during the occasion through online medium.

The Vice President, Shri M Venkaiah Naidu today called upon researchers and scientists to pay greater attention to agriculture and come up with innovations to address the problems faced by farmers. Speaking on the occasion Shri Naidu said from providing timely information on various issues to farmers to creating cold storage facilities and supplying new technologies should be the focus of innovators and researchers.

He stressed the need for preventing farmers’ exploitation by middlemen and ensuring remunerative prices for their produce. He said the AICTE, ICAR, NIRD and agriculture universities should work in unison to bring new innovations and technologies to farmers.

Emphasizing the need for India’s higher education system to play the role of an enabler and force-multiplier to drive Indian innovation and start-up ecosystem, the Vice President said “Innovation must become the heartbeat of education. Quest for excellence must become the norm”.

Urging educational institutions to reinvent themselves to create these essential conditions for innovation to thrive and creativity to blossom, Shri Naidu said that our educational eco-system must constantly nurture the innate spirit of inquiry and innovative problem-solving.

Expressing his happiness that the New National Education Policy has made a number of recommendations that will foster innovation, he said: “It has outlined a new vision that can vastly improve the quality of teaching and learning as well as research”.

The Vice President said the policy lays great emphasis on comprehension, critical thinking, analysis and the joy of discovering new facets of the world of knowledge. “It seeks to break the silos and connect different disciplines through multi-disciplinary learning. Establishing this connection between fragments of information and evidence is truly vital for innovation”, he stressed.

Shri Naidu called for concerted efforts to inculcate the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among our students to make them ‘out of the box’ thinkers, creative problem solvers, entrepreneurs, and job creators rather than job seekers..

Urging higher educational institutions to redouble their efforts to move up in this ranking exercise, the Vice President said India needs many more institutions of high standards to significantly alter the country’s development trajectory. “We need to learn from the best in the world and aim to be better than the best”, he stressed.

Shri Naidu expressed his happiness on completion of two years of ARIIA rankings and congratulated All India Council for Technical Education and Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell for their efforts towards setting goals for the higher education institutes and making India further improve on its global innovation ranking.