Australian High Commissioner to India Harinder Sidhu, will be on a four-day visit Punjab from February 17-20 for advancement of cooperation in agriculture sector.
Ahead of her visit, Sidhu today said, "Australia and India's northern region enjoy close ties particularly in education, agriculture and sport sectors."
"A large proportion of Australia's Indian community comes from the region, and Punjabi is now one of the top 10 languages spoken at home in Australia," she was quoted as saying in a press release by the Australian high commission.
Sidhu said this will be her third official visit to Punjab, and "I look forward to advancing our cooperation in the agriculture sector".
The high commissioner will visit the Borlaug Institute for South Asia in Ludhiana, where she will meet stakeholders from the state government and the farming community to talk about Happy Seeder a technology that could help address environmental issues along with stubble burning.
"Happy Seeder is an excellent example of practical cooperation between Australia and India. It was developed by the Punjab Agricultural University and Australian engineers and scientists with support from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research a decade ago," she said.
For more than three decades, Australia and the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, have collaborated in wheat research to improve productivity.
Sidhu will visit PAU and meet the researchers and Australian alumni to learn about the outcomes of this collaboration.
In Ludhiana, she would launch two skill development initiatives by UDAY, a social enterprise run by Australian alumnus Param Singh - the Project Mooo App and mobile dairy van, the release further said.
The Project Mooo App will offer dairy farmers an analytics-based learning approach through a user-friendly mobile phone application.
On a personal level, Sidhu said she is looking forward to her visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
"The visit to the Golden Temple is very special for me at a personal level. Both my parents are Punjabi, and my father was born in Punjab," she said.
The Indian-origin Harinder Sidhu was appointed as High Commissioner to India a year ago.
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