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First Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting of ICAR-Network Program on Precision Agriculture (NePPA) at ICAR-CIFRI, Barrackpore January 10-11, 2023

Barrackpore, 12^th January , 2023
ICAR-Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), Barrackpore organized First Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting of ICAR-Network Program on Precision Agriculture (NePPA) during January 10-11, 2023 at HQ Barrackpore.
Dr. S. K. Choudhry, DDG(NRM), ICAR is the chairman of the steering committee of ICAR-NePPA program. The program is monitored by technical advisory committee which is constituted with twelve eminent experts from ICAR, IITs and Universities. Dr. Amitabh Bandyopadhyay is the chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee. Sixteen ICAR institutes are working under this program.

The meeting was inaugurated on 10th January, 2023. Dr. B. K. Das, Director, ICAR-CIFRI welcomed all the TAC members and participants from different ICAR institutes. 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. R. N. Sahoo, Program leader (ICAR-NePPA) presented the entire NePPA program concepts, its objectives and future prospective. He discussed about the action plans of each objective and the progress so far.
Prof. J. Adinarayana, IIT Bombay and Member TAC chaired the meeting and he emphasized that focus should be on selection of right technology to solve the problems. He also advised to prepare the benchmark dataset and that should be available to public in future. TAC members Dr. Pranjib Kumar Chakrabarty, Former Member, ASRB; Dr Kanchan Singh, Former ADG (Engg), ICAR; Dr Rajeev Srivastava, Former Head, Remote Sensing Division, NBSSLUP, ICAR; Dr. M. Prabhakar, Former Head, Crop Production ICAR-IIHR, Bangalore; Dr A.G. Ponniah, Former Direor, ICAR-CIBA & ICAR-NBFGR, ICAR; Prof. Abdul Samad, Former Dean and Director of Instructions MAFCU, Nagpur 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.

TAC members Prof. Santanu Chaudhary, Director, IIT-Jodhpur and Dr. M. Prabhakar Former Head, Crop Production, ICAR-IIHR, Bangalore joined virtually and expressed their valuable comments like appropriate avenue to make generated data available to public for more generous involvement of experts across the country, validation of developed technology and implementable to small scale farming. ICAR may directly link to the startups to develop the concrete outputs from the program.
The inauguration session is ended with formal vote of thanks by Dr. Joydeep Mukherjee, ICAR-IARI.
After inauguration, PIs of sixteen ICAR institutes have presented their project progress followed by thorough discussions.
On 11th January, 2023 Dr. S.K. Choudhury, DDG(NRM), ICAR joined the meeting virtually and mentioned about the future prospective of program and ICAR expectations. He encouraged the team members to dedicate and come out with viable solutions implementable to the field.
Other team members of each partner institutes joined virtually and participated actively in the meeting. All the suggestions for improvement of the project were recorded to follow up. The meeting was ended on 11th January, 2023 with formal vote of thanks.