H.H The Rajah’s College(Autonomous Accredited B+)Pudukkottai
The Post Graduate and Research Department of Botany, is one of the oldest departments in the college, was started in 1964 with Tamil and English Medium 20 students each. Later on the Department was initiated with M.Sc., Botany in the academic year 2004- 2005 as a self finance course with intake of 20 students. Then the course with approved by government in the year 2008 as regular programe. After that It has been recognized as research department from 2009 for M.Phil with intake of 12 students and 2011 for Ph.D. The department has produced 80 M.Phil and 4 Ph.Ds. The department library has more than 1650 books and five journals. The department has conducted more than 15 conferences / seminars / workshops / webinars etc.
The department has well equipped laboratory facilities to provide the practical training to the students. Highly qualified and experienced faculty with specialization in Tissue culture Studies, Mushroom cultivation, Vermitechnology, Phytochemistry, Plant biotechnology, and Environmental biology etc., are the highlights of the department. The students are given exposure to develop entrepreneurship skills in accordance with curriculum of Seed Biology, Poomology, Vermiculture and Mushroom cultivation through hands-on training, field trails, workshops and our reach programme. The faculties are also involved in the development of e-content which serves as reference source for student community.
For its exceptional performance both in teaching and research, the Department has been receiving substantial financial assistance over the years under UGC, TNSCST, TANSCHE Most of the faculty members are experts in their respective fields of research and teaching and their contributions are evident through their high quality research publications in reputed National and International journals, book-chapters, review articles and recognitions by National academic bodies such as IASc. Quite a few collaborative national research projects (DBT-Foldscope Project) and a large number of research projects funded by The Ministry of Environment and Forests and UGC are being handled by the faculty to pursue excellence in plant biology research.
The Department has provided a platform for several National and International Conferences and specialist lecturers on topics of current research interest by foreign and Indian educators and has organized workshops and symposia on thrust areas of plant science in collaboration with others scientific bodies. Greater emphasis is given for collaboration and relationship building with new ‘partners’ by way of Memorandum of Understanding and the department has MoU with ACE International Pte. Ltd., Singapore, and Nature Science Foundation (NSF), Coimbatore.