Interacting with the faculty, Dr. Harsh Vardhan emphasized
the need for doing new innovations that have an immediate societal impact with
the common man as the target. He counselled researchers to shift from routine
to out of the box thinking and to dream big to translate their efforts to
greater innovations. He also said there should be a method for scientists to
work to set timeframes to achieve their targets.
NABI is the first Agri-Food and Nutritional based
Biotechnology Institute, which has been set up by the Dept. of Biotechnology in
the Knowledge City, Sector 81, Mohali. CIAB has been set up adjacent to NABI
and is the first institute dedicated to generation of secondary agriculture bio
products through value addition to unutilized and underutilized biomass. Both
the institutes area part of agri-food cluster in the Knowledge City, Mohali
along with its neighbouring institutes, like; IISER, ISB, INST and Biotech
Park. The campus comprises of laboratory buildings, 15 acres of land for field
experiments, a large glass house, transgenic net houses, office area, housing,
guest house, research scholar hostel, utilities and other requisite services.
Total entire area of the campus is 50 acres. The building complex of CIAB has a
total floor space of 77000 square feet built at a cost of Rs Forty three crores
whereas NABI has a total floor space of 3,17,500 square feet built at a cost of
Rs one hundred and thirty five crores.
The institutes apart from providing quality research in the
field of agricultural biotechnology and bio processing also provide innovative
technologies in the field of food processing.. Under reach to community program
NABI is playing an important role in conducting motivational course to the
students of local schools to increase their awareness in life sciences. Their
products of nutritionally rich crops and processing of crop residues in useful
products will be provided to the local farming communities to increase their income.
The industry ready specialized products like high anthocyanin have already been
taken by local industries under specific MOU. They are acting as nodal agencies
for local organization in the areas Agri food and nutritional biotechnology.