SKUAST-K Sandwich Model for Student Research: Sharing Knowledge & Networking for Excellence  

National Education Policy-2020 envisions a higher education system that promotes human as well as societal well-being and helps build India as envisioned in its Constitution. Besides creating competent human resource, higher education significantly contributes towards sustainable livelihoods and economic development of the nation through basic and applied research. As India moves towards becoming a knowledge economy and society, more and more young Indians are likely to aspire for higher education. The 21^st century India will be driven by technology and data solutions in all fields including agriculture. National agricultural education and research system of India is one of the largest networks in the world and has significantly driven India’s march towards a self-sufficient and food surplus nation through an outstanding network of research institutions and state agricultural universities.

NEP-2020: Widening participation and enhancing access

Given the challenges of future and India’s role in global food security scenarios, agricultural education has to be responsive and embrace the technology led transformations. State agricultural universities that are mandated with regional issues facing agriculture have played a pivotal role in regional growth in agriculture. However, as envisaged in NEP-2020, there is no room for stand-alone universities and institutions have to come forward to harness each other’s strengthsto create universities that are regionally relevant but nationally and internationally connected, to overcome infrastructure bottlenecks as well as bring in the ecosystem changes. Sandwich concept will help SAU’s to expose students to new frontiers of science and technology, where they are yet to have tangible human resource or the physical infrastructure such as AI, ML, Data sciences, genome editing, high throughput phenotyping etc.

In order to create an institutional framework for such connected research especially the student research at masters and doctoral level, SKUAST-K in its Institutional Development Plan in 2018 envisioned a SANDWICH model for making postgraduate research more meaningful by research engagements with national and international institutions, universities as well as industries to expose our students to better research facilities. This has created significant impact in enhancing the research capabilities of our students as well as strengthening the mutual collaboration between partner institutions. Our premise for projecting SANDWICH as a  Just in Time intervention  is the increasing global evidence of a strong positive correlation between participation in sandwich courses and employment, particularly in relation to high-quality ‘graduate level’ jobs,

SKUAST-K approach for SANDWICH research

SKUAST-K model laid the broader contours of sandwich approach in light of NEP guidelines that seeks to transfer and accommodate the instructional and research credits between partner institutions.

We followed the following three step approach.

1. Identifying partner institutions: SKUAST-K reached out to the best global and national institutions as well as industries to create a mechanism for student exchange. During the last three years, university signed more than 150 working MOUS/MOA’s with such institutions with a focus on building student capacity through a residential researchperiod. Currently SKUAST-K has some of the leading international institutions such as ICRISAT, Kansas State University, IRRI, Connecticut Research Station, Western Sydney University, Padova University, Nebraska Medical Centreetc as well as all leading national institutions under ICAR as partner institutions for sandwich programme.

2. Creating Institutional framework for student research: SKUAST-K is the first SAU in India and First University in J&K to have made sandwich as a mandatory residential requirement for masters and PhD research with a residential period of 3-6 months and 6-12 months respectively. As of now, all postgraduate research programmes are to be offered in sandwich mode with an arrangement for a co-advisor from partner institutions. Currently a large number of our PG students have co-advisors from leading global and national institutions.

3. Leading national initiative on institutional collaboration: SKUAST-Kashmir led the national initiative on institutional collaboration with a SRINAGAR DECLARATION signed by all the vice chancellors of SAU’s in the annual workshop of vice chancellors of SAU’s in 2023. The declaration calls for sharing of niche, resources and expertise between SAUs to overcome infrastructural and human resource bottlenecks across SAU’s. This has created a unified umbrella framework for such collaboration and overcome the institutional governance hurdles.

Excellence in research and scholarly output through Sandwich

During the last three years, many of our students have had residential sandwich period in prestigious institutions across globe. This has resulted in improved research output in terms of high impact publications, research leads, and opportunities to present research before international research community.  Not only this, many of our sandwich scholars have got offers of graduate and postdoctoral fellowships from partner institutions. At the institutional level, SKUAST-K is now a nationally and globally connected university with a significant footfall of our graduates in leading national and international institutions.

Taking Partnerships forward: Joint Degree accreditation

The partnerships built with institutions across the globe have given access to our students to state of art facilities for research and helped them preview the realms of advances in science and technology that could help us build solutions to the global challenges. SKUAST-K is committed to sustaining and strengthening our mutual collaborations with partner institutions and build upon the existing framework to develop joint accredited short courses leading us to full degree programmes. We have successfully demonstrated that partnership model with Western Sydney University, Australia and are exploring same with other national and international institutions.

SKUAST-K with a vision of creating Next Gen science and policy leaders is working with the partner institutions to develop joint accredited programmes that will make international higher education affordable and accessible.

(Parvaze A Sofi is Professor  & Head, Division of Plant Genetics & Breeding; SKUAST-Kashmir and Azmat Alam Khan is Officer on Special Duty to Vice Chancellor, SKUAST-Kashmir)