10th Annual Review Meeting of ICAR Seed Project – Seed Production in Agricultural Crops held during 24-25 August, 2015 at CCARI, Goa
10th Annual Review Meeting of ICAR Seed Project – Seed Production in Agricultural Crops held during 24-25 August, 2015 at CCARI, Goa
The inaugural session of 10th Annual Review Meeting of ICAR Seed Project – Seed Production in Agricultural Crops was held on 25 August, 2015 at CCARI, Goa . Dr. Narendra Pratap Singh, Director, CCARI, Goa welcomed the Chief Guest Shri Pratap Singh Raoji Rane, Former Chief Minister of Goa. The other dignitaries on the dias were Dr J.S. Sandhu (DDG Crops, ICAR), Dr RR Hanchinal (Chairperson, PPV&FRA), Dr JS Chauhan (ADG Seed, ICAR) and Dr S Rajendra Prasad (PD, DSR, Mau). Dr. Narendra Pratap Singh explained very briefly the activities and achievements of the CCARI
Dr. J.S. Chauhan, ADG (Seed) presented the insights of the ICAR Seed Project. He highlighted the increase in agricultural production vis a vis seed sufficiency. He emphasized about the importance of SRR for productivity increment. He emphasized focus of XII Plan should be to increase overall seed production/VRR/SRR and quality control.
Decadal progress of ICAR Seed Project was presented by Dr. S. Rajendra Prasad (PD, DSR). He exhorted that as current year is International Year of Soils, our objective is to produce quality seed by taking care of soil health for a healthy life. He highlighted the salient achievements during ten years of project implementation with respect to quality seed production, infrastructure creation, farm mechanization, and technology dissemination.
During the occasion, best performance centres for the year 2014-15 were announced. ANGAU, Hyderabad was awarded as best performing center among universities and IIPR, Kanpur among ICAR Institutes and two publications were released viz ‘Decade of ICAR Seed Project: retrospect and Prospect’ authored by Rajendra Prasad and team and ‘Millet Seed Technology’ authored by Vilas A Tonapi & team .
Guest of Honour Dr. R.R. Hanchinal, Chairperson, PPV&FRA, congratulated all the scientists involved in this project for making tremendous improvement in producing and making available the quality seed of newly released varieties to the farming community of the country. He also emphasized the importance of crop diversity available in India and its use in mitigating the effect of climate change as well testing and promoting the Farmer varieties.
Shri Pratap Singh Raoji Rane emphasized that Good seed and breed are very important for a farmer to reach some fruitful results. He emphasized on research aspects of salt tolerant varieties for Low lying lands in the state of Goa. He highlighted the importance of GMO’s which can play a lead role in meeting the day to day growing food requirements and suitable for climate change conditions, thus highlighted importance of seed programme on GMO’s.
In the Presidential address, Dr JS Sandhu, DDG (Crops), ICAR, highlighted the importance of Seed Project by informing the house the situation of food grains during 1965 wherein how the import of 18000q of wheat seed yielded tremendous results.He also made a mention of use of biodiversity in improving the existing varieties. The strength of public seed sector is that it meets 55% of the seed requirement of the country. In response to GMO’s he also emphasized that ICAR is working on transgenics and new varieties are coming, which must be spread through this project to meet out the challenges of climatic change.
Dr. Manohara K. K. , Scientist (Genetics and Plant Breeding) gave the vote of thanks.