Agriculture Courses: Universities navigate NEP reforms with skill enhancement programmes and staff crunch

NEW DELHI: Most agricultural universities and colleges have started incorporating the changes in the curricula and framework mandated by the National Education Policy and outlined in the Sixth Deans’ Committee Report of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) for the fresh batch of aspirants joining the institutes in 2024-25. However, the pace and intensity of implementation varies with some universities and states going all in, while others chart a more deliberate approach.

While Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Kashmir (SKUAST-K), has become the ‘first in the country’ to adopt the Sixth Deans’ Committee Report, Lovely Professional University (LPU) in Punjab’s Phagwara has embraced practical skill enhancement courses from the first year.

Published in September last year, the Sixth Deans’ Committee Report seeks to re-orient agriculture education at the undergraduate (UG) level towards NEP’s objectives of flexibility, inclusivity, skill development, and the integration of technology.

The proposed reforms have led to new multidisciplinary programmes and courses in emerging areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. But at the same time, the universities are faced with the challenge of reviving the curriculum within their institutional constraints – inadequate infrastructure, trained teachers and funding being the foremost obstacles.

SKUAST K: The ‘first’

In its pursuit of making agriculture education more relevant, the SKUAST-K, a state university in Srinagar, has started five “market-driven” UG programmes this academic year, including BSc (Hons) in Economics with Data Science, BTech Biotechnology and BTech Biochemistry.

The university is also running a four-year course in artificial intelligence in agriculture in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, taking the tally of its UG courses to 13, one of the highest in the country. Utilising the freedom to modify up to 30% of ICAR curriculum, the university has inserted three data science courses across all its UG programmes.

“Earlier we used to teach statistics, but the subject has now been upgraded to data science keeping in mind the future trends,” said vice-chancellor Nazir Ahmad Ganai.

SKUAST-K has also converted its 55-odd postgraduation (PG) and PhD programmes to the “sandwich pattern”, requiring scholars to complete a part of their course at another university. For this purpose, the institute has tied up with around 50 universities, though the students are free to pick a different institute of their choice.

“We want to bring some wisdom at the research level. We are the only university in the country to do so,” said Ganai.

The institute could immediately see the impact of these reforms with its enrollment doubling from about 500 to 1,000 within a year, including 11 international students.

Skill enhancement courses

With the new curriculum in place, the students are pursuing a variety of practical courses from the first year of the UG course. Earlier, these opportunities were usually limited to the “experiential learning” component in the final year.

For example, Lovely Professional University (LPU), a private university in Punjab’s Phagwara, is offering video and photography and nursery management as options for skill enhancement courses in the first year.

Explaining the utility of these skills, Shailesh Kumar Singh, an associate dean at LPU’s School of Agriculture said, “While extension activities have always been part of agriculture education, they also need to keep up with the times. Earlier, farmers used to visit the Krishi Vigyan Kendras to learn about advances in agriculture, they now rely more on YouTube videos for this purpose. Hence, students should also move to the digital space. Similarly, the nursery management course is important for urban horticulture.”

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The institutes have also found the Deeksharambh, an elaborate two-week long induction course, to be useful. “We conducted the new induction programme for the new batch of students at the university, where they met with alumni and people from the industry. This helps them chalk out a career path for themselves while they study,” said Ajay Kumar Sah, dean (agriculture) at Bihar Agricultural University (BAU), a state university in Bhagalpur.

However, some institutes are yet to warm up to the curricular reforms. A Angayarkanni, dean, faculty of agriculture at Annamalai University, a state university in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, said that they are yet to implement the Sixth Deans’ Committee Report and that she was unable to discuss it any further.

The Maharashtra Council of Agriculture Education and Research (MCAER), the state body regulating the four public agricultural universities, has prepared its own curriculum in line with ICAR’s recommendations. However, the state is yet to take a call on allowing the multiple entry and exit facility.

“Since this is just the first year of implementing the new syllabus, we will take one step at a time. The government has formed a committee with officials of all four universities to formulate the rules for entry and exit. But nothing has been decided so far,” said Mahanand Mane, associate dean, College of Agriculture, Pune, a government-run institute.

Agriculture Courses: The flip side

While universities tweak their fare according to the new regime, arranging for requisite teaching staff has emerged as the biggest hurdle. While some institutions lack enough faculty for the newly-introduced subjects, others are struggling to adjust to the changes in workload dynamics brought by the shuffling of subjects across academic levels. At some places, teachers haven’t been sufficiently trained and oriented for new programmes, leaving them scrambling to stitch together content for their lectures.

“We are trying our best to implement the Sixth Deans’ Committee Report in the first year. Our main challenge is capacity, as we don’t have teachers for traditional farming and indigenous culture. We are now planning to hire some guest faculty,” said Gautam Saha, vice chancellor of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, a state agricultural university in West Bengal’s Nadia district.

Changes in the subject mix has impacted the workload distribution among teachers. Sarwar Imam, an agronomy teacher who worked at a college in Western Maharashtra explained the problem with citing the first year syllabus of BSc Agri (Hons) programme, where ICAR has dropped introductory courses in forestry, genetics, crop physiology and agriculture microbiology, replacing them with skill enhancement and more application-based and interdisciplinary subjects such as ‘Farming based livelihood systems’ and ‘Environmental Studies and Disaster Management’.

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“Those who taught the former subjects got their workload reduced, while I was expected to teach a farming-based livelihood systems course, in addition to the agronomy paper I taught. This created an imbalance,” he said.

To overcome the problem, the college decided to offer skill enhancement courses only from the subjects whose teachers got their work reduced.

What made the situation more challenging was the fact that the teachers received little training beyond a couple of online orientation programmes. “I had taught a similar subject named ‘Farming system and sustainable agriculture’ in the fourth semester. While this paper was more focused on agricultural economy, the new subject has elements of dairy and poultry science – topics I had little prior experience in,” said Imam.

One of the reasons other agricultural universities, specifically BAU and SKUAST-K, had a smoother roll out of NEP courses is because of their faculty situation. While the former hired 200 new teachers between 2022 and 2024, taking its faculty strength to 500, the latter got 400 new teachers in the last two years, filling up almost 90% of its posts. LPU is roping in faculty from its other schools to teach skill-enhancement courses.

NEP-aligned curriculum: Impact on students

Despite its promise of flexibility and student-centred approach, the new curriculum risks burdening the students with more academic work.

“The UG syllabus has so much unwanted content. There are still a large number of courses, leaving no time for any internships. The students will be spending their entire time in the books. This is what they did in the Fifth Deans’ Committee report,” said Sahadeva Singh, dean, School of Agriculture Sciences at Galgotias University, a private university in Noida, who previously served as deputy commissioner and head policy at the erstwhile Planning Commission.

Ninaad Mahajan, national president at All India Agricultural Students Association and a master’s student at University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, echoed this sentiment. “Agriculture was a holistic discipline with almost 54 subjects ranging from psychology to science and economics being taught at UG level. The added components might lead to stress among students,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mahajan is hopeful that the NEP-aligned framework will bring the much-needed recognition to the discipline.

“Earlier, many who would fail to get into medicine would land up at agricultural universities. But now I see many picking it up as their first choice. Many a time, agriculture graduates are overlooked in favour of engineers. We had also hoped that the Sixth Deans’ Committee would consider changing the generic nomenclature of BSc Agri to Bachelor of Agriculture Sciences,” he said.

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Shailesh Kumar Singh also reported positive feedback from LPU students. “Several students from the senior batches wanted to know if similar changes will be brought to their curriculum. We assured them that we will utilise the flexibility provided in the Fifth Deans’ Committee to improve their courses too,” he said.

Sahadeva Singh, however, remains sceptical. He believes that the new curriculum doesn’t go far enough in aligning agriculture education with the industry’s requirements and has a “theoretical” approach. The reason for this lacuna, according to him, is that the ICAR panel didn’t have a wider consultation with stakeholders, especially industrialists and the students.

Another worrying aspect of NEP implementation is the decrepit infrastructure and poor funding at some of the institutes. “The infrastructure at government institutes is old. The established universities have been divided up, but their resources have remained the same. They are in a dire need of money to collaborate with the industry. Since ours is a livelihood field, we can’t raise funds on our own,” he said.

Ganai, however, believes that the agricultural institutes, too, have the potential of generating funds. As evidence, he points to SKUAST-K’s efforts to incubate agriculture start-ups on the campus. “We have incubated around 55 startup companies in the last three years. The institute takes equity from these companies through a section 8 (non-profit) company. We are also looking at consultancy projects for fund generation,” he said.