Meghalaya Governor wants agriculture to be a choice for youth

Shillong, May 12 : Meghalaya Governor R S Mooshahary today said a policy change is needed to make agriculture a vocational choice for the educated youth. "The current mindset that agriculture is the vocation of uneducated rural youth with no skill has to be changed by our affirmative action to make it a vocation of dignity and respect," he said at the Indian Centre for Agricultural Research (ICAR) complex at Umiam, near here. He emphasised on the need to set up farm schools in villages to provide hands-on experience in farming to youths. According to the Governor, agriculture must be in a position to attract young men and women with good education to take it as a vocation of choice and not a choiceless livelihood option where despair and poverty force people to kill themselves. Mooshahary suggested a policy change which could inculcate farming spirit in our young men and women in educational institutions. "Many of them have not even seen any food crop of livestock husbandry and they are not sensitive to the farmer's plight. So the students in educational institutions from the level of high school to university should be given lessons in farming by introducing a basic agricultural syllabus," he said. Mooshahary said setting up of farm schools would help the youths learn the techniques of farming at an early age which would also encourage them to be new generation farmers and stop their migration to urban areas.