A workshop on ‘Poverty, hunger, food security and nutrition: From concepts to measurement’ was organised for the post-graduate students bythe Department of Agricultural Economics of the College of Agriculture of Pant university in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai on Saturday. The chief guest of the inaugural session of the workshop was Dr B Kumar, Dean, College of Agribusiness Management of Panvarsity, whereas Dr YV Singh, Officiating Dean, College of Agriculture, presided over the session. Dr Vijay laxmi Pandey from IGIDR and Bharti Kulkarni from National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, were also present besides Dr Ml Sharma, Head, Department of Agricultural Economics and Dr Anil Kumar, Professor of the department.
In his address Dr B Kumar said that poverty is a multidimensional science and when 70 per cent of population is reeling under poverty, it really has become a crisis. Students of all subjects, including business management, need to study poverty from their own point of view to understand this problem and find its solution.
Dr Singh, in his presidential address said that the time is ripe when we should switch over to breed nutrition-rich varieties of different foodgrain and other crops so that healthy food could be produced. He also advocated adopting precision farming and polyhouse cultivation to produce more with optimums use of inputs.
Dr Pandey and Kulkarni considered it great that such a workshop is being organised at a university which is known as harbinger of green revolution. They said that the issue of the workshop is very important which must be understood well by the students so that they could work on its eradication in their career ahead. Technical sessions were held afterwards and a question-answer session was also held.