TED Newsdesk, COIMBATORE: The Tamil Nadu Agriculture University (TNAU) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a University from Ukraine on Friday. This MoU deals with collaboration in education and research activities.
In brief: the MoU with Ukrainian university NULES, the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences, links an Indian state farm university founded in 1971 with a Kyiv institution that describes itself as Ukraine’s leading agricultural university. The agreement was signed online, not in person.
The two universities- TNAU and the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences (NULES) signed the agreement virtually. Staff and students could thus be exchanged under this, as per a TNAU release. The idea behind this agreement for collaboration is innovations for increasing farm productivity and aims at sustainable energy production.
Prof. Stanislav M. Nikolaienko, Rector, NULES and Dr N. Kumar, Vice-Chancellor, TNAU shared their remarks and plans concerning this MoU on Friday.
At present, a joint Indo-Ukraine research venture is underway at the University of Renewable Energy Engineering, TNAU, which aims at producing maximum energy from biomass materials.
The biomass work behind the MoU with Ukrainian university NULES
The research thread the two universities named, getting the most energy out of biomass, is one TNAU has worked on for four decades. Its Department of Bio Energy, part of the Agricultural Engineering College and Research Institute in Coimbatore, says on its own pages that it has been developing equipment since 1982. Its research brief is to measure how farms and agro-industries use energy, find where renewable sources could replace fossil fuel, and adapt devices for farm and factory use, with small, medium and large agro-industries as well as homes as the target users.
The list of technologies the department credits to itself is long and practical. It includes a TNAU fixed dome biogas plant, a low cost biogas burner, a biomass gas stove and a community chulha, rice husk and wood based gasifiers, a tar cracking gasifier, a pilot plant for biodiesel, a pyrolytic reactor for biochar, a process for making bio coal from lignocellulosic biomass and a hydrothermal liquefaction reactor for producing biocrude oil. Its gadgets are on show in a Renewable Energy Park on the campus, which the department says more than 10,000 people have visited.
That is the base on which the joint Indo-Ukraine venture at TNAU’s renewable energy engineering department sits. For TNAU, the MoU with Ukrainian university NULES adds a foreign partner with its own long record in agricultural engineering to work that is already running, rather than starting a new line of research from nothing.
Two agricultural universities with long histories
Both institutions trace their roots to the late 19th century. TNAU’s own record of milestones begins with an agricultural school opened at Saidapet in Madras in 1868, which moved to Coimbatore in 1906. The Agricultural College and Research Institute opened there in 1909, and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University came into existence in 1971 with Coimbatore as its headquarters.
Engineering arrived early. In 1972 the university set up its College of Agricultural Engineering at Coimbatore with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering, and it later added a B.Tech in energy and environmental engineering in 2004 and a B.Tech in bioinformatics in 2006. International links are not new either: in 2008 the university introduced a dual degree master’s programme with Cornell University in the United States.
NULES has a similar arc. According to the university’s history page, it began as an agricultural department opened at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute on 30 September 1898, which became an agronomy faculty in 1918. In 1922 that faculty became the Kyiv Agricultural Institute, an independent institution from 1923. A merger in 1954 with the Ukrainian forestry institute created the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy, which became the Ukrainian State Agrarian University in August 1992 and was given national status by the Ukrainian parliament in July 1994.
The Kyiv university has its own record of working abroad. Its history page records that between 1985 and 1990 the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy helped and coordinated the creation of an agricultural institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The institution also absorbed the Kyiv Veterinary Institute in 1957 and, in the 1990s and 2000s, a string of regional agricultural colleges and technical schools, so that the university now spans agronomy, forestry, veterinary science and engineering.
TNAU grew in the same way. Its milestones list records that a Faculty of Post Graduate Education was set up in 1975, with master’s and doctoral programmes in environmental sciences and biotechnology following, and that the Madras Veterinary College became a constituent unit of the university in 1976.
What has happened since
Seventeen months after the signing, on 24 February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the partnership’s Ukrainian side found itself in a country at war. India mounted an evacuation of its citizens. Around 22,500 Indian nationals returned from Ukraine between 1 February and 11 March 2022, and 90 evacuation flights were operated under Operation Ganga, including 14 Indian Air Force flights, the Ministry of Civil Aviation told the Rajya Sabha, according to the Press Information Bureau. The government said it had paid the full air fare on all of those flights.
The war put student and staff exchange of the kind envisaged under the MoU with Ukrainian university NULES in a different light, with one partner now in a country at war. The Education Daily found no public statement from either university, on the pages it could reach, about exchanges or joint projects carried out under the agreement since 2020.
TNAU has continued to sign academic partnerships closer to home. On 2 February 2023, for instance, it signed a memorandum with Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University in Guntur covering student training and postgraduate research, with that university’s vice-chancellor and registrar travelling to Coimbatore to sign in person, according to a TNAU press note.
