SME Times News Bureau | 16 Nov, 2019
The 8th International Conference on
Agricultural Statistics (ICAS-VIII) will be organized by the Ministry of
Agriculture in New Delhi from 18th to 21st November 2019.
Addressing the media in New Delhi on Friday, Trilochan
Mohapatra DG ICAR & Secretary DARE informed that the conference will be inaugurated by the Union Minister for
Agriculture & Farmers Welfare Shri Narendra Singh Tomar and Chief Guest
will be Bill Gates.
The conference will be organised in collaboration with the Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation, ISI-CAS, FAO, the USDA, ADB, World Bank, Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, Eurostat, AfDB and various other organizations.
The theme of this year’s ICAS is ‘Statistics for
Transformation of Agriculture to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs)’.
Trilochan Mohapatra said that it is for the first
time that such an important conference in the field of agriculture statistics
is happening in the country and this will be a learning opportunity for the
statisticians, young scientists and decision makers in India to adopt modern
practises in agriculture such as Big Data analysis, AI, precision farming etc.
He added that the conference is held with an aim
to address various challenges faced in producing data to report on the SDGs and
various leading research and also to deliberate and finalize the best practises
in the field of agriculture statistics.
The Director General said that the Conference
will see participation of more than 600 delegates of which 200 delegates will
be from 108 countries. There will be 5 plenary sessions and 44 technical
sessions.
Dr. Mohapatra added that ample discussions are
not happening in the field of statistics in the country today even if a large
amount of data is available.
He further emphasized that this available data
should be utilised effectively in agriculture sector with help of modern
methods and practises taking inputs from the conference.
Speaking at the briefing, Dr. Michael Steiner
World Bank representative & International Statistical Institute-CAS chair
said that ICAS is a series of conferences that started in 1998 based on overarching
need for agricultural data worldwide.
The conference is conducted every three years
based on overarching need for
agricultural data worldwide and the last conference was held in Rome in
2016.
He added that the agenda for this conference
covers domains of food and agricultural statistics, related methodologies,
technologies and processes.