ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (ICAR-IASRI), New Delhi celebrated its Annual Day on July, 03, 2023.
The celebration started with the planting the saplings of Rudraksh by the Chief Guest Dr. Himanshu Pathak, Secretary, DARE & Director General, ICAR; Guest of Honour Dr. R.C. Agrawal, DDG (Agricultural Education), ICAR & ND (NAHEP), distinguished speaker of 33rd Nehru Memorial Lecture Dr. Santanu Chaudhury, Director, IIT Jodhpur.
The light from the lamp is seen as a metaphor for the illumination of the mind and the eradication of ignorance The dignitaries lit the lamp and after that IASRI song was played, this started the formal annual day function of the institute.
Dignitaries were felicitated with bouquet of flowers, another bouquet of Millets signifying the International Year of Millet 2023, shawl and a Tulsi plant.
Dr. Rajender Parsad, Director of the Institute delivered his welcome address and presented the activities and accomplishments of the institute. He also gave a glimpse of major achievements, honours & awards, collaborations & linkages, products, digital initiatives and outputs etc, of the institute in his presentation. The crisp yet elaborative presentation covering all the aspects of the institute was well appreciated by the Chief Guest Dr. Himanshu Pathak and others. The dignitaries had all applause for the good work done and being done by ICAR-IASRI.
ICAR-IASRI brings out various publications every year and few of them were released in the annual day function. The dignitaries released four publications namely: Agricultural Research Data Book (ARDB) 2023; Technical Bulletin on “Evaluation of Comprehensive Scheme for Cost of Cultivation of Principal Crops (CS Scheme)”; Technical Bulletin on “Evaluation of Improvement of Agricultural Statistics (IAS) Scheme” and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Brochure. After the release of the publications, Dr. Upendra Kumar Pradhan, the lead author of a research paper published in a Journal with Impact factor more than 10 (13.99) was awarded a certificate.
Guest of Honour and IASRI alumni Dr. R.C. Agrawal, DDG (Agricultural Education), ICAR & ND (NAHEP), in his remarks, not only threw light on the glorious past of IASRI but also shed light on the contributions and importance of the institute in not only for ICAR but for entire NARES. He called IASRi to be the “heart of entire ICAR and NARES” and said that ICAR cannot work properly with this heart.
After the remarks of the guest of honour, Chief Guest of the function Dr. Himanshu Pathak, Secretary, DARE & Director General, ICAR, gave the presidential address. First of all he congratulated the entire IASRI fraternity on the occasion of the Annual day and also appreciated the efforts made by IASRI in making it a institute working good work. He also described what we all should do on the annual day. As per him, first thing we all must do is to exchange the pleasantries, second to present and discuss what we have done in the year gone by and lastly we all should think upon what to do in the future to make the institute move ahead. Dr. Himanshu Pathak, in his address conveyed that we have high expectations from IASRI as IASRI has a lot of contributions towards the ICAR. He talked about the importance of Quality data, correct data and authenticated data for well informed decisions.
For the first session, Dr. Sudeep, Principal Scientist and TAC In charge proposed the formal vote of thanks.
Nehru Memorial Lecture is an integral part of our annual day Celebration every year. This year, we had a distinguished speaker Dr. Santanu Chaudhury, Director, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur with us to deliver the 33rd Nehru Memorial Lecture on the topic “Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture”. The Speaker first paid his floraltribute to the frist Prime Minister of the country Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru and then Dr. Rajender Parsad, Director, ICAR-IASRI welcomed the speaker in the Session: 33d Nehru Memorial Lecture and introduced him to the audience.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Santanu Chaudhury, emphasized upon the Generative Artificial Intelligence, Probabilistic Casual Reasoning etc. He also talked about the issues faced by AI in its acceptance by users like: Lack of explainability and Trustability issue. Dr. Santanu Chaudhury explained the importance of Generative Advisory using AI in Agriculture an also talked about developing open query based chatbots for agriculture applications. In his presentation, Dr. Santanu Chaudhury explain the four major points of Machine Learning Integrity. They are : ML Consistency, ML Explainability, ML Security and ML Producibility. He was of the opinion that Observational Casual Inference framework is important to be developed by emulating the experiments in agriculture.
After the Nehru memorial lecture, Dr. Rajender Parsad, Director, ICAR-IASRI, felicitated the speaker with a memento and certificate.
The function ended with a vote of thanks by Dr. Rajender Parsad, Director, ICAR-IASRI.
