Welcoming YPARD India representative – Sridhar Gutam

Sridhar Gutam is our new YPARD India National Representative.

Sridhar Gutam after earning a Ph.D. (Plant Physiology) from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, had joined Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in 2004. He is currently working as a Senior Scientist (Plant Physiology) at Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture (CISH), Lucknow. His areas of research interest include plant physiology, abiotic stress management, bioinformatics and intellectual property rights in agriculture.

He has a strong commitment towards the promotion and development of agricultural scientific community at a national and international level. While pursuing his PhD at IARI, he was elected as President of the Post Graduate Students Union (PGSSU) for the term 2000-01. In the ARS service, he is now Joint Secretary of the Agricultural Research Service Scientists’ Forum (ARSSF) since 2008. He has a strong affinity for ICTs and is using social networking sites as platforms for agricultural and other related research communities to discuss issues related to the promotion and advancement of agricultural research in India.

Sridhar has a particular interest in the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in agricultural research and was involved in setting up the first open access institutional repository in ICAR, Eprints@IARI.

Over the time, he had become an Open Access evangelist and is advocating Open Access to science and scholarship as convener of the online group, Open Access India. He is  a member of Open Science working group of Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and administrator of  Open Access community of Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) web portal. He had participated in the International Expert Consultation on ‘Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing’ at Beijing, China (2011) and ‘Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2) at Punta del Este, Uruguay (2012).

Sridhar likes to quote Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the India’s first Prime Minister who said after India’s Independence that : “everything else can wait but not agriculture” and  whishes to express his desire and commitment to work with dedication and sincerity to help the society through the agricultural research for development and engage with it for fulfilling the needs of society.

For this, he would like to work in collaboration with the Indian Agricultural Universities Association (IAUA), PGSSU, ARSSF and All India Agricultural Students Association (AIASA), for strengthening the YPARD network in India and its objectives namely, promotion of agriculture among young people; facilitation of exchange of information and knowledge, access to resource and capacity building opportunities in agriculture and contribution to ARD policy debates. He envisages joint work with ‘Attracting and Retention of Youth in Agriculture’ (ARYA), a project of ICAR.

Welcome Sridhar; keep up the energetic and passionate work you have been doing with YPARD – YPARD India is growing!