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Dr Mannava Sivakumar
Dr. Mannava Sivakumar was born on 30 August 1950 in Guntur (AP). He obtained his B.Sc (Agri) in First Class with Distinction from the Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University in 1970. He earned his M.Sc (Agronomy) with a perfect grade point average (4.0/4.0) from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, India, in 1972; and his Ph.D in Agricultural Climatology from the Iowa State University (USA) in 1977. He was a recipient of several scholarships during his academic career including the Coromandel Fertilisers GROMOR scholarship (1967-70) during B. Sc. (Ag); Junior Research Fellowship of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) from 1970 to 1972 during M.Sc.(Agri); Senior Research Fellowship of ICAR (1972-73), National Scholarship for Study Abroad of the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare of the Government of India (1973-77) and the Graduate Teaching and Research Assistantships of the Iowa State University in USA (1974-77) during Ph.D studies.
Dr Sivakumar began his professional career in 1977 as an Agroclimatologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India where he conducted agroclimatological research for improved farming systems. He carried out rainfall climatology studies employing Markov chain probabilities and incomplete gamma distribution for several locations in semi-arid India and West Africa. His major research emphasis was on identifying the physical and biological processes that largely determine crop performance and on establishing the basic principles that describe these processes. His main focus was on studying the semi-arid crop response to variations in water, radiation and temperature. He adopted the line-source sprinkler irrigation technique to study the response of dryland crops such as sorghum and groundnut to water stress. Dr Sivakumar collected congruent datasets in a soil-plant-atmosphere framework for use in the development and testing of dynamic, process-based crop production models in collaboration with other colleagues.
In 1981, Dr Sivakumar wa s promoted to the international cadre as the Pri nci pal Agroclimatologist and was made responsible for the Agroclimatology subprogram of the Farming Syste ms Research Program in ICRISAT. H e continued agroclimatological research using a holistic approach by evaluating the macroclimate of a region and the microclimate of crops. He used the knowledge emanating from...