The Hindu Business Line : ICAR chief wants farm graduates to be job creators

THE Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Dr Mangala Rai, emphasised the need to prepare agricultural graduates to start their own agri-business, preferably in the rural areas.

The agricultural graduates "must prove to be job creators and not job seekers," he said pointing out that a study done by Applied Manpower Research Institute indicated that 43 per cent of the agricultural graduates and 23 per cent of the postgraduates were unemployed after completion of their degree programme in 1999-2000.

The same study, he said, had revealed that by 2010, the cumulative excess supply over demand at current employment rates would be 34,000 for agricultural graduates and 6,000 for veterinary graduates as the existing annual demand for agricultural and veterinary graduates was about 7,000 and 1,550 respectively.

Addressing the 36th annual convocation of the Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University (ANGRAU) here recently, Dr Rai said that unemployment among the youth in rural areas had also increased between 1993-94 and 1999-2000 from 9 per cent to 11.1 per cent among males and from 7.6 per cent to 10.6 per cent among females.

Casual wage labour in the rural areas increased from 29.7 per cent of rural employment in 1977-78 to 37.4 per cent in 1999-2000.

Given this scenario, Dr Rai felt that it was essential for the agricultural education system (AES) to innovate course curricula suiting to concerns and issues relevant to real life.

In essence, AES should "aim at producing professionals and academicians who are self-confident, self-reliant and self-competing individuals."

The Vice-Chancellor of ANGRAU, Dr S. Raghu Vardhan Reddy, said that a total of 908 candidates including 616 under-graduates, 292 post-graduates and 48 doctorates have qualified to receive their degrees at the Saturday's convocation.

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