RONO HILLS,Dec 6: Eighteen faculty members from different colleges of the state are participating in a 10-day workshop on ‘Analytical methods & modelling in geography’, which got under way at Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU) here on Wednesday.
Addressing the inaugural function, former RGU professor (Botany), Arup Kumar Das, said geographers could be a part of mega projects like roads construction, planning, and impact assessment studies.
He, however, rued that geography experts are not coming up with a clear picture on why the Siang River has turned muddy.
Expert from Kolkata Presidency University, Prof Soumendu Chatterjee, said while geographical technology has undergone a lot of changes globally during the last decade, in India it is lagging behind.
“We need to learn new methods, systems and techniques, and understand the future by studying the changes,” he said, adding that geography is credited for helping in planning processes, and known for amalgamating scientific techniques and drawing result-oriented syntheses.
Prof Ramkrishna Maiti from Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, said,”There is a gap between our potentiality and resultant output.We are in a critical stage of knowledge discrepancy,” he added, and lamented that, somewhere, geography “has lost the science of synthesis technique.”
RGU Registrar In-charge, Prof Tomo Riba, Head of Geography Department, Prof SK Patnaik, and Associate Professors, doctors Sailejananda Saikia and Tage Rupa Sora also spoke.
