NAHEP: Boosting Agricultural Education with India’s Need for Skilled Human Resources

Agriculture has always remained the core of the Indian economy. It is responsible for employing approximately half of the Indian workforce. Recently, it came into increasingly intense pressure from climate change, resource availability, and the current need for technology-based agricultural practices in the country. At the same time, the severe shortage of qualified human resources is expected to impede its progress.

This, it is observed, is in contrast with the one million graduates that are required in the agricultural and related sectors, mostly driven by the demands of the current as well as the future that unfold for the nation. The given scenario is linked with the widening gap that is observed in one of the most crucial areas of the nation.

Thus, to address this issue, the Government of India in 2017 describes the solution through the National Agricultural Higher Education Project along with the support of ICAR, with financing assistance from the World Bank. This proposal suggests the enhancement of agricultural education to make it meet international levels of global standards.

According to NAHEP, there are 74 agricultural universities in the country that have established serious efforts in reforming themselves. There are changes brought into their curriculum through digitalization, learning by experience, emphasis on more application-based learning, improvement in teaching, research, and global collaboration.

Now, the impact of this policy is that the number of agricultural university enrollments is more than Double in 2017-2022, which is evidence of renewed student interest. Also, female enrollment percentages rose from 43.6 percent to 45.2 percent, members of which indicate progress in the inclusivity of women in agricultural education.

In total, NAHEP directly reached 826,761 faculty members and students during this timeframe, with almost half or 421,138 beneficiaries being female.

Such projects as NAHEP are also being seen as efforts that would fall into key steps involved in preparing a broad and well-trained manpower that would ensure continuity in growth, innovation, and rural development in the upcoming decades, seeing that it is progressing into developing a climate-resilient and technology-based farmland economy.