Under Vice Chancellor Prof Nazir Ahmad Ganai, SKUAST-Kashmir has gone from a conventional state agricultural university to the scientific spine of a Rs 5,013 crore farm programme, and the first incubator in Jammu and Kashmir that the state's startup ecosystem now measures itself against. In January 2026, at the Annual Startup Mela in Jammu, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah handed the Incubator of the Year award to a centre that did not exist five years ago. The SKUAST-K Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (SKIIE) Centre took home a Certificate of Excellence, Rs 50,000 in prize money and a Rs 50 lakh capital seed fund. Four of its incubated ventures, Cashmircarbozone, Alhamdan Crafts, Safavi Organics and Innxu Innotech, walked away with Rs 20 lakh each in Government of India seed grants. For an agricultural university in Srinagar, it was an odd sort of trophy. It was also the point. "The SKIIE Centre is a place of hope for young innovators and startups," Prof Nazir Ahmad Ganai, Vice Chancellor of Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, said at the ceremony. It is a line he has been repeating, in one form or another, since he took charge in December 2021. Prof Ganai's thesis is straightforward and, for a state agricultural university, faintly heretical: an agri university's output should not be measured only in papers and passing grades, but in patents that become products and graduates who become employers. The restructuring started with the classroom. SKUAST-K became the first agricultural university in India to adopt the ICAR Sixth Deans' Committee report, the framework aligning agricultural education with the National Education Policy 2020, at its Academic Council meeting in September 2024. The university had also contributed to drafting that report. It went on to launch India's first BTech in Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture, run with IIT Mandi, alongside a BSc in Economics and Data Science, and it moved the entire examination system to a paperless, computer-based format. The undergraduate "Degree by Design" model, which lets students assemble specialisations around a career intent rather than a fixed syllabus, is one the university says has since been picked up as a national template across 78 institutions. Hiring followed curriculum. Prof Ganai has spoken of adding roughly 400 teachers in two years, filling close to 90% of vacant posts, a contrast with the staffing crises that hollow out many peer institutions. Enrolment now stands at 4,333 students, with women outnumbering men, and 85 students clearing the ICAR/CSIR/UGC NET in a single year. The bigger lever was policy. J&K's Holistic Agriculture Development Programme, Rs 5,013 crore across 29 interlinked projects in agriculture, horticulture and livestock, was conceptualised by a UT-level apex committee of national experts chaired by Dr Mangla Rai, the former ICAR Director General, and dedicated by the Prime Minister in 2024. SKUAST-K is its
