Tamil Nadu Agricultural University

Well, it's Monday so it must be TNAU.  Off fairly early for the short trip to what is regarded as the premier Agricultural University in the country.  We started with a round table session with the former Registrar and a range of senior officers from the University.  We then split off into parallel session where we each had an opportunity to talk with people from the University who were most able to deal with our individual topics.  This revealed an incredible amount of information but I think we were all most impressed by the amount of extension work the college does with the rural community.  They initiate a whole range of schemes to empower rural communities to deal with modern agricultural practice, including creating stock cultures of nitrogen fixing bacteria which are seeded into rice paddies to help to reduce artificial fertiliser use in these areas.  They also work with local groups to help to educate them about post-harvest processing - for instance pulping tomatoes when there is a glut and storing the pulp for sale at a later date.

The University is governed by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, and most of their income is from the State Government.  Theay also have a range of newer income generating courses. Like many of the institutions they have a 'reservation' for students from poorer backgrounds (there are various names for these groups) and their quota for these places is about 50% of their intake.  One interesting point - the VC, Registrar and all of the other managerial posts are taken by academics, on a three year term.  It is not usual for this to be extended.  There are 26 of them and they are all replaced by open competition from amongst the academic saff at the same time every three years! Despite the turmoil this must cause they all seemed happy that it generated the academic buy-in that they need.

The Univeristy are very keen to improve the standard of IT skills amongst their students and they are all required to posess a laptop pc.  The campus is wireless-enabled and so students can frequently be seen studying together in the cloister-like environment of the beautiful buildings.  The postgraduate students gave us a demonstration of their video capture skills in recording lecture classess for later use as an on-line resource for the undergraduates.

Another scheme they have to generate extra income for farmers is wine making.  Our hosts offered us a drink of their latest effort - date and honey wine.  Unfortunately we are all teetotal, so we politely declined, but we are reliably informed it is rather like a fine sherry in flavour.