The Professor and Head, KVK

The Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Kottayam has been in the forefront of promoting agriaquaculture enterprises and technology dissemination in its thrust areas to the rural population in Kottayam and nearby districts of Kerala since April 2004. The KVK, spread in an area of 22.82 ha is ideally located at Kumarakom, an emerging hotspot in the global tourist map. It supports the farm community of Kottayam serving 72 villages under five Taluks in Kottayam district viz. Vaikom, Meenachil, Changanacherry, Kottayam and Kanjirappilly, and the neighbouring districts as well, in diverse fields of Agronomy, Fisheries, Home Science, Horticulture, Plant Protection and Soil Science. The KVK is focused at organising vocational training programmes in agricultural and allied enterprises, onfarm testing and frontline demonstrations (in farmers fields) in crop production, horticulture, livestock production, aquaculture etc as well as providing inservice training of field level extension officials. It is the noble mission of KVKs to strive for the empowerment of rural communities, by providing them alternate means of income from agriculture based technologies. Regular, on-campus as well as off-campus training programmes are conducted by the KVK in horticulture, vermicomposting, mushroom cultivation, fish culture, organic farming and so on. Hundreds of farmers are benefited by the trainings, and many are already selfemployed, motivated by these trainings. Thus the KVK acts as an effective facilitator to equip the rural youth from mere job seekers to job providers. A notable feature of the training programmes of KVK Kottayam is the presence of large number of women participants in its training programmes. Empowerment of rural women by enabling them to take up the challenges of selfemployment using technologies developed by Kerala Agricultural University is taken up as a major task of this KVK.