Forestry students have no jobs - a post on Times of India

Forestry students have no jobs
Jayashree Nandi, TNN, Oct 3, 2010, 12.06am IST

BANGALORE: If this had been an engineering or medical college, the cry would have reached far and loud, but not with students pursuing forestry.

Nearly 400 students at the two forestry colleges -- Government Forestry College in Ponnampet (Kodagu) and in Sirsi -- have stopped attending classes, protesting against a recruitment policy of the forest department that gives more opportunities to general graduates than forestry graduates.

According to the policy, only 50% of the forestry graduates are recruited to the posts of range forest officer (RFO) or assistant conservator of forests (ACF). The remaining 50% are usually recruited from general streams or are even engineers. This has led to a huge number of forestry students not getting recruited to the forest department, despite having a specialized knowledge of the field.

RTI REVELATION

According to an RTI filed by an MSc forestry student, Harsha K G, in the past 10 years only 138 forestry students were recruited to the positions of RFO and ACF. The rest were only internal promotions of the department.

"There is 50% reservation for general graduates, which is not in place in any other state, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and others. To top that, the number of notified posts is only 80. So forestry graduates have only 40 seats to compete for. A lot of internal promotions from lower ranks happen, so most seats are occupied. Despite doing a four-year BSc course, the forest department doesn't recruit us. We end up looking for jobs in NGOs or doing something that is completely different from our specialization," explained Harshavardhan M, a forestry graduate who had to do an MSc in horticulture as there were no opportunities in forestry.

According to another student Harsha K G, "Ours is a very technical course where we learn several subjects including forest management, wildlife and range management, tree genetics, tree improvement and others. But our expertise is not used. Who will be motivated to study forestry if this is our future? Especially when environmental issues are taking centre stage, forestry is a very important area," he said.

Harsha, an MSc in forestry, said in the past three years, only five ACF posts were filled by forestry graduates.

STUDENT'S PLEA

The demand of these 400 students is to make BSc (Forestry) as the basic criterion for entry-level posts such as RFO and ACF in the Karnataka forest department. This is the third time the students are protesting. Last time, the students had met former forest minister C Chennigappa. But it stopped at that.

This time, the students met forest minister CH Vijayashankar, but he has asked for a month's time to look into the issue.

"It has not been made a minimum qualification in our state because forestry is not a technical subject. Other specialization graduates can also do well in the forest department. It is up to the forest department to decide whether this can change," said principal chief conservator of forests (PCCF) B K Singh.

Read more: Forestry students have no jobs - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Forestry-students-have-no-jobs/articleshow/6674250.cms#ixzz11IWfGwYd