The Hindu Business Line : Need to impart special training to upgrade skills of rural youth stressed

THE Minister for Rural Development, Dr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh on Monday called upon the need to impart special training for skill upgradation and productive employment opportunities to rural youth after providing them with proper and requisite training.

The Minister was inaugurating a National Conference jointly organised by the Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), the Institute of Applied Manpower Research (IAMR) and Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) for training one million rural unemployed in skill upgradation. This training programme which has been taken up under the umbrella of NGOs capable of providing training for the benefit of the target groups is one of the major initiatives of the Ministry of Rural Development and CAPART in recent months to foster productive and market-oriented employment outlet and opportunities for the rural unemployed.

The Minister was particular that CAPART and NGOs should establish appropriate linkages with financial institutions like NABARD and SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India) and the commercial banks operating in their respective areas, besides establishing linkage with the productive enterprises, trade and services sector. He was confident that through the vehicle of NGOs it would be possible to organise a large number of income generation programmes and take forward the productive and market-relating activities to higher levels. He said that depending upon the success of first stage of training of 50 NGOs the experiment could be replicated and more number of NGOs could be brought under this programme for the benefit of the rural unemployed poor. The Ministry of Rural Development has set apart an initial corpus of Rs 12 crore to CAPART to begin this training programme in different parts of the country.

On this occasion, the Minister also released the single source information document containing all the revised policy guidelines of CAPART, its recently re-classified major schemes, and procedural and monitoring arrangements for the benefit of NGOs of rural India.

Explaining the rationale behind reclassification of its plethora of major schemes, the Director General, CAPART, Mr L.V. Saptharishi said that this has been done in such a way by retaining the extant schemes and also adding new ones and bringing about rationalisation and concentrated thrust under each category on one important dimension or other in the realm of rural development. He said that CAPART would henceforth have a special scheme tailored to rural women. The revised policy guidelines issued in a document would help NGOs in getting assistance with the least possible delays, he added.

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