Dr. Balasaheb Sawant Vidyapeeth
Dr. Balasaheb Sawant Konkan Krushi Vidyapeeth is located in the coastal region of Maharashtra with a landscape of the Western Ghats Biodiversity hotspot. It is distinguished from the rest of the Maharashtra state by virtue of its distinct agro-climatic conditions and vast coastal belt of 720 kms. Main field crop of Rice is followed by several niche crops like mango (alphonso), cashew, spices, millets and oilseeds. In addition, fisheries and forestry resources are also uniquely dealt with by this University. The steep increase in demand for quality and safe food at affordable price leads to innovation and business opportunities in agriculture and allied fields.Agriculture education is producing professionals who can intervene in the farming process through various agri-prenuership and employment. These business models and innovations will emerge through quality education in agriculture. The need of the hour is to engage highly educated and skilled people in agriculture who can drive our economy forward.
The agricultural graduates trained in virtual classrooms with e-learning or blended learning facilities will develop their conceptual clarity and critical thinking ability. Technology has greatly impacted the global society in all areas and the field of education is no exception. Agricultural education must increasingly adapt to educational technological change, particularly in daily instructional methods in order to more effectively prepare the world’s future agricultural leaders. The faculties also need to be upgraded with the latest subject knowledge along with modern teaching-learning process through international outreach. The application of modern methods of pedagogy will enhance the agricultural students’ interest and performance at national and international level. The improved performance of students and faculties in education and research will reflect in improvement of university ranking.
The vast coastal belt has unique feature of this university is imparting fisheries education through the College of Fisheries, Ratnagiri. There are 50 million people involved in the production of fish. An estimated 660-820 million people of the global population 87% of them are in Asia (FAO, 2015).However, the technical knowhow about the innovative technologies in fisheries and aquaculture are the major constraints. It is therefore, necessary to concentrate towards new innovative technological education for fisheries/ aquaculture sustainability. The quest of this knowledge will be satisfied with the virtual or augmented reality in fisheries education will directly involve in subject knowledge expertise and ultimately leads to an innovative business model in fisheries students and faculty.
The innovative education approach in agriculture and agri allied entrepreneurship on small scale is the only solution to the problems of unemployment, proper utilization of both human and non-human resources and improving the living conditions of the poor masses. The novel concept of nurturing the budding innovators at Centre for Innovation in Technology, Teaching and learning (CITTL) with five satellite centres is proposed here and supported with vocational training for technology commercialisation. The ultimate learning environment will transform the attitude and behaviour of students toward agriculture and they will step up into advanced fields like ICT, AI, ML,Robotics, Augmented reality and Virtual reality with major emphasis on development of business attitude, entrepreneurship and new business avenues through this project to flourish the agriculture.