Shimla- The All India Coordinated Research Project (AICRP) on Post Harvest Engineering and Technology (AICRP on PHET) Solan centre of the Dr YS Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry (UHF), Nauni has once again brought laurels to the university at the national level. The centre has been adjudged second in the ‘Best Centre’ for the year 2019-20 among 31 AICRP centres from the country.

The award was presented during the 35th Annual workshop of AICRP on PHET held at JNKVV Jabalpur. The research engineers and scientists of AICRP on PHET centres from across the country participated in the workshop and presented their progress report. Dr Devina Vaidya, Dr Manisha Kaushal and Dr Anil Gupta from the Solan centre also presented their progress report, shared new project proposals, and machinery and process protocols developed by them during the meet. The work was evaluated by Dr SN Jha, ADG (Agricultural Engineering), Dr SK Tyagi, Project Coordinator AICRP on PHET, Dr SM Ilyas, Former Director, NAARM; Dr BS Bisht, Former Director, CIPHET, Ludhiana and Dr Anwar Alam, Former VC, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences. The award was given on the basis of outstanding contribution in development of technologies, NAAS rated publications in national and international publications.

The Solan Centre is in operation since 2004 in the Department of Food Science and Technology (FST) and is working on pome and stone fruits, kiwi, mushroom, ginger, aloe vera and some underutilized grains of the state. Last year the centre had bagged the ‘Best Centre Award’.

“The assessment for the award was based on yearly progress made by the centres in the field of development of process protocols, designing of machinery, pilot-scale testing of developed technology, entrepreneurship development and dissemination of developed technologies among farmers and scientific community. Several process protocols for the development of aloe vera based products, mushroom fortified products, the complete value chain for apple, gluten-free protein-enriched pasta, utilization of bichhu grass and gethi for bakery and extruded products have been developed by the centre,”

 said Dr Devina Vaidya, Principal Investigator of the centre.

Dr Anju Dhiman, HOD of the Department of Food Science and Technology told that the PHET centre has signed MOUs with three entrepreneurs of the state and complete protocols developed by the centre has been transferred to establish their industries.

University Vice-Chancellor Dr Parvinder Kaushal congratulated the scientists on the achievement. He said that the centre has been a consistent performer and the same has also been recognized by the ICAR.

Dr Kaushal added that the department has been making sincere efforts in developing efficient technologies and have ensured that the same is transferred to the farmers and entrepreneurs of the state from time to time. Director Research Dr JN Sharma, Dean Horticulture Dr ML Bhardwaj, and other faculty and staff also congratulated the scientists for bringing laurels to the university.

Solan: The All India Agricultural Students Association (AIASA) has awarded the ‘Institution of Excellence’ Award to Dr YS Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry (UHF), Nauni. The award was announced at AIASA’s National Youth Convention, which recently concluded at the Indira Gandhi Agricultural University, Raipur. The event was co-organised by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). 

Besides the Vice-Chancellors of several universities, the event saw the participation of scientists and researchers from 74 universities of the country. Dr RC Aggarwal, ICAR DDG (Agriculture Education) was the chief guest during the convention. The University bagged the award for its immense contribution in the field of horticulture and forestry.

AIASA’s National General Secretary Praveen Verma presented the award to UHF Vice-Chancellor Dr Parvinder Kaushal at a function organized at Nauni.

Apart from this award, the university also bagged three other awards at the convention. While Dr KS Pant bagged the Best Teacher Award, Pankaj Thakur, a PhD Agribusiness scholar was honoured with the ‘Aawahan’ award. Another student, Priyank Sharma won second prize for oral presentation.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Parvinder Kaushal thanked the ICAR and AIASA for recognizing the efforts of the university in promotion of horticultural and forestry activities in the state.

He gave credit to the faculty, students and staff of the university, who have made significant contributions to education, research and extension activities for the past three decades. He assured that the university would continue to strive for the development of this sector so that the income and livelihood avenues of the farmers of the state can be increased.

Shimla-A delegation of Himachal Pradesh University’s former student leaders and elected office bearers of the Students Central Association (SCA) on January 18, 2020, submitted a memorandum to the President through Governor Bandaru Dattatraya at Raj Bhavan, Shimla to show their solidarity with the students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) amidst the current turmoil. The signatories alleged that the student agitation for fee rollback has been met with aggressive counter, wherein students and teachers of the University have been brutally assaulted, under the implicit support of the Professor M. Jagdish Kumar, Vice Chancellor, Delhi police and political forces whose masked goons unleashed violence on January 5, 2020.

Among dozens of students and teachers attacked with rods and bricks, Professor Sucharita Sen, Dr. Ameet Parameswaran, and Ms. Aishe Ghosh, President JNUSU, were seriously injured in the brutal organized attack. And, till date, no arrests have been made and to the contrary criminal cases have been filed against the JNUSU office bearers and other students, they said.           

They also said that JNU has been the second best ranked University in India, first being IISc Bangalore, by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), MHRD, for its knowledge generation, academic outputs, briefly, owing to five parameters viz. (i) teaching, learning and resources; (ii) research, productivity, impact and IPR (RPII), (iii) graduation outcome, (iv) outreach and inclusivity and (v) perception.

Apart from the contribution of JNU to the overall human resource development and contribution to the national development as is evident from these criteria, the last stated criterion, ‘perception’, is the most important in the present scenario wherein 24×7 propaganda machinery is working hard to defame this esteemed centre of learning, they said.  Its academic preeminence has again been affirmed recently as out of 32 candidates selected as IES Officers, 18 are alumni of JNU. Thereafter, the Union HRD Minister also had to state ‘JNU is Our Top University’, they added.

The memorandum said that along with this, it is not out of place to put here that JNU also has earlier been considered a prestigious University world around. It has kept alive the very spirit of the debate in Indian Parliament when the bill for its establishment was placed for discussion as in the Rajya Sabha on 1 September 1965 by the then minister of education, M.C. Chagla. During the discussion on the bill, Bhushan Gupta, MP, voiced the opinion that ‘….this should not be yet another university…and one thing that this University should ensure was to keep noble ideas in mind and provide accessibility to students from weaker sections of society.’ And since the JNU Act came into force on 22 April 1969, the students and the faculty of this University did not let the Indian Parliament down and hugely contributed to take this University to the top by way of a work culture unique in India.

Today, JNU is also known for its alumni who occupy important bureaucratic and ministerial positions in India including in the present central government, the memorandum said. In this backdrop, the functioning of Professor M. Jagdish Kumar, Vice-Chancellor, during his four years tenure and with focus on January 05, 2020, violent attack, on students and faculty, needs a serious look. He was selected as Vice-Chancellor by the then President of India by ignoring the HRD Ministry’s note on the appointment of a new V.C. for JNU that had a veiled warning that Kumar could be a misfit to run JNU. His functioning as VC has been detrimental to the growth of this University as comes out of his four years tenure and the recent incidents have made it obligatory that he should be sacked immediately being complicit in the mob attack on students and teachers on January 05, 2020, it said.

The signatories have given the following five reasons behind their demand to remove the JNU VC:

1. For the past four years of his tenure, the Vice-Chancellor has been working to “change the character of the University” without weighing the outcome of his measures. He has an ideological framework and is trying to plant a pre-drawn action plan, which is leading to a confrontation with students and faculty members and is the basis of the recent unrest in JNU where he is not paying attention to the elected bodies, JNUSU and JNUTA. For him, a decision means ‘no discussion’. JNU has an intellectual culture and has always been anti-establishment, and he is not fit to understand that due to his ‘robotic approach’. He could not understand the inherent strengths of JNU which has a culture of open debate between peers, teachers and students, and dissent.
2. Till date, he did not even bother to meet and see the injured students showing his biased behaviour to a particular group of students and JNUSU, while facilitating the other group of students. It is in the public domain now that Professor Kumar did not allow police entry into the campus while the masked goons were attacking the innocent students despite administration receiving panic calls of the students being attacked. Even a political party accused him of being the “mastermind” of the attacks and demanded his immediate dismissal and a criminal investigation against him and some faculty members who conspired with the attackers and the security company on the campus. Even, BJP stalwart Professor Murli Manohar Joshi, Ex-HRD Minister, has sought dismissal of Professor Kumar conveying to the powers that be that the rule of law and institutional credibility are supreme in a democratic country.
3. The Vice-Chancellor should have learnt a lesson from the Wardens of hostels, where students were attacked, who quit their posts on moral grounds taking responsibility for failure to protect students, and resigned on moral grounds on the night of January 5th itself. During the last four years of his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor of JNU, he has caused more harm than good to the University mainly sticking to his style of functioning and his ideological leaning.
4. He has been obstinate not to listen to the grievances and demands raised by the JNUSU. Despite the fact that students proposed “first step” towards resolving the deadlock that they were ready to register for the new semester by only paying the tuition fees and not the hiked hostel fees, Professor Kumar did not respond to their move. It is too inhuman for him not to see the injured students after the brutal attack.
5. He did not take any pre-emptive steps to prevent the mob attack on the students and the faculty members knowing well before the incident that something serious is going to happen on the campus between January 4 and 5. Now, after all, that has happened, he did not take any post-incident steps to assuage the feelings of the aggrieved party. That firmly confirms his complicity in this whole incident, hence he should be sacked.