SRINAGAR: The 21 days NRDMS-DST sponsored summer school on “Geospatial Technology for Sustainable Future and Development” was inaugurated at SKUAST-Kashmir, Shalimar campus today by Prof. Nazeer Ahmed, Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor. The summer school is attended by about 33 participants from various institutions of the State as well as from other states of the country. Directors/Deans and faculty members of the University were present during the inaugural function.
Prof. Nazeer in his inaugural addresses highlighted the scope for the organisation of such type of summer schools and impressed upon the scientific fraternity and trainees that such type of technological innovation should be adopted to suitably exploit available resources for meeting the challenges of production and mitigating hunger of an ever-increasing populace.
Prof. Nazeer highlighted that agriculture has many challenges, making it more and more difficult to achieve higher agricultural productivity with the available natural resources which have become more vulnerable to climatic extremes. Geospatial tools can help raise productivity, improve efficiency across agriculture and allied sectors. On the occasion, Prof. Nazeer explained the beauty of geospatial technology and the non-invasive nature of the technique for obtaining valuable information from the soil surface and below it.
He said that the methodology of this summer school would be interactive one and will give opportunities for one to one interaction and will draw the attention of researchers to increase their curiosity and raise their knowledge level, where they are ready to apply it and through this technology will explore possibilities for exploitation of natural resources and boosting farm production with minimum negative impact on environment.
He stressed that all intuitions in the state should form a common platform and explore opportunities to take advantage of geospatial technology for sustainable development of the state. A manual on “Introduction to QGIS” was also released on the occasion.