By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 18 Feb: A twelve day training programme on “Tools and Techniques of Sampling in Soil and Water Conservation” was inaugurated at ICAR-IISWC, here, today. This training is the first of its kind being organised by IISWC under the National Fellow Project. It marks the start of normal functioning at the institute. A total of 17 participants have registered for the Training – 12 Technical Officers from ICAR-IISWC, Dehradun, 2 Technical Officers from ICAR-IISWC, RC, Chandigarh, 1 Scientist from KVK, Barari, Jhansi, and 2 Scientists from WTC, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi. The training will be conducted in hybrid mode with 13 participants joining physically for the training while three will be connected virtually.
The inaugural function was chaired by Dr RS Yadav, Director, ICAR-IISWC, Dehradun. He said the programme would provide a common learning platform for the participants and make them more competent to work at the field level. Dr NK Sharma, Head, SS&A, also stressed upon the importance of such training programmes. Dr D Mandal, National Fellow and Course Director of the Training, briefed about the content and various modules. He highlighted how management of natural resources is the key to sustainable development, and policies and programmes largely depend on the scientific data generated from research organisations working in this field. Particularly for ICAR-IISWC, Dehradun and its regional centres, which solely works on soil and water conservation and managing natural resources, the data generated is of prime importance as it directly reflects the cause and effect of soil degradation. So, perfection is a prerequisite for sampling and recording observations at the field level which would help to draw firm inferences about the different research experiments going on at the Institute. Therefore, this training was the need of the hour to develop expertise in this domain. Dr Gopal Kumar, Course Co-Director delivered the welcome address and Dr Uday Mandal, Course Coordinator, proposed the vote of thanks.
The programme was attended by heads of Divisions, scientists, technical officers and other staff of the Institute. The function was supported by Dr M Sankar, Dr Ramanjeet Singh, Dr Trisha Roy, Dr Devideen Yadav, Dr Pankaj Srivastava, Dr Nishita Giri and staff of the Institute KR Joshi, Dinesh Kumar, Ajit, Abhisekh and Vinod.