IIT-Ropar on Tuesday announced its partnership with IIT Alumni Council to set up first Global Centre of Excellence (GCE) in the area of agritech and water.
This will be the first such GCE under the India Innovation Network (i2Net) initiative set up by IIT Alumni. The focus for the GEC will be agritech and water with multi-disciplinary support from artificial imaging, computer vision, IoT sensors, chemical engineering, nuclear physics etc.
Notably, IIT-Ropar had recently received Rs 110 crore worth of projects for agriculture and water from Department of Science and Technology. As part of an agrarian state, it has been one of the mandates of IIT-Ropar to take up research aimed at addressing water-agriculture related issues.
Sarit K Das, Director, IIT-Ropar, said, “We are looking forward to leading globally in research for Agritech and Water. By optimally exploiting the new paradigms emerging from the deployment of artificial intelligence, remote sensing and genomics, we are uniquely positioned to blend tradition with technology in a very different way.”
Agriculture 2.0
The GCE will help India leapfrog to Agriculture 2.0 by increasing productivity, reducing chemical fertiliser and pesticide levels, managing water resources and creating better linkages with markets and direct consumers using disintermediation platforms, the statement said.
“The agritech and water ecosystem being co-created along with existing research and academic institutions will lay the foundation for Agriculture 2.0. In addition to revitalising the agriculture economy, the research initiative will also help create a contract and funded research ecosystem capable of earning substantial foreign exchange,” Ravi Sharma, President of the IIT Alumni Council, stated.
