Nagpur: With the restructuring of Agriculture Scientists Recruitment Board (ASRB), about 60 institutes and research centres countrywide under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (
ICAR) are likely to get
directors and heads in a few months. These posts have been vacant for past 3-4 years.
ICAR secretary Chhabilendra Roul told TOI the process of appointment of directors will start soon and these posts may be filled in a few months. “There is an effort to make recruitment process as transparent as possible. It will be made online and objective,” he said. Roul was in the city for a visit to various ICAR institutes here.
ASRB has now been separated from ICAR and linked to Department of Agriculture Research and Education (DARE). This is expected to make the board impartial and transparent.
It will now be a four-member body headed by a chairman who can be a scientist (other than from agriculture field) or a bureaucrat for a period of three years only (earlier it was six years). Besides the chairman, the three members can be persons from plant sciences group including crop sciences and horticultural sciences, animal sciences and fisheries or natural resource management, agriculture engineering, agricultural education, social sciences and agriculture statistics and other emerging disciplines. “Even a former ISRO chairman can be a chairman of ASRB,” said Roul.
The recruitments will soon be done using an online process where scientists themselves will be able to objectively assess their score. Roul said a special software has been developed and will be deployed for maintaining the scorecard. “In fact, even the process of transfer will be objective,” he said.
Sources in ICAR are questioning the revamping of ASRB. They say if the institutes like IARI can be run on additional charge posts, why should ICAR fill these posts at all. “Let them run ICAR in its present messy form,” said a former official. Questions are also being raised on reducing the tenure of chairman of ASRB to half which they feel is too short.
