Patna, Feb 1 (IANS) The Bihar government will provide 200 acres at a token Re.1 per acre on a 99-year lease for setting up a Borlaug Institute for agricultural research, an official said Wednesday.
The institute will be located at Pusa in Samastipur district.
The central government had last year announced three Borlaug Institutes to harness the best of international science in meeting food security challenges and make India an agricultural hub for the South Asian region.
The other two centres are coming up at Ludhiana in Punjab and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh.
The institutes will house state-of-the-art research facilities to support research on maize and wheat and broaden the range of varieties and tools available to farmers. They will also strengthen local crop breeding programmes to meet food production challenges.
The Bihar centre will focus on the research priorities of eastern India.
Agriculture Production Commissioner A.K. Sinha and department secretary N. Vijaya Lakshmi had informed the central government about the decision on the land at a meeting in New Delhi recently, the official said.
Norman Borlaug and India’s M.S. Swaminathan helmed this country’s Green Revolution in the mid-1960s and the 1970s that saw a dramatic increase in wheat production that completely did away with the need for exports.
