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High cost of biotech research impedes crop betterment: Expert

Dr M. Maheswaran, director of research encouraged students to involve in research and development.

Coimbatore: A two day national level conference ‘Bioconcorrenza’16 and PG biotechnology seminar’ was organised at Tamil Nadu Agriculture University (TNAU).

Dr M. Maheswaran, director of research encouraged students to involve in research and development. He appreciated B. Tech students’ achievements in obtaining research internships from reputed international institutes like Khorana fellowship in USA. He mentioned that the biotechnology will play major role in eliminating heavy metal toxicity like chromium in soil and groundwater.

Students from various universities and educational institutions had participated in this event, and exhibited their research breakthroughs in poster display competition. Dr K. Ramasamy, vice-chancellor, TNAU said that the contribution of women in Tamil Nadu government organisations and in universities have dramatically incre ased.

“Seventy-four percent of the students pursuing higher education in Tamil Nadu are women and fifty-two percent of the professor and heads of various departments in TNAU are women.”

He also urged the scholars to pursue their research in India.

“Students should come up with novel innovations and ideas to develop indigenous technologies,” he added.

Short-listed students from various universities and educational institutions delivered oral presentation about their research project aims, methodology and achi evements of their undergraduate, post graduate or doctoral works.

During poster presentation session short-listed participants displayed their posters and explained their research objectives and achievements to the visitors.

Dr. Shivendra Bajaj, executive director of the association of the biotech led enterprises-agriculture focus group (ABLE-AG) insisted that the students should have a strong foundation by reading basic textbooks.

“Biotechnological oriented researches are more expensive, and that is the main reason for biotechnology based crop improvement programmers are in a lagging phase in India. Among the countries that increased the productivity by adopting a recent technology, India is in a low rank. New solutions combined with biotechnology can address various environmental issues,” he said.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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