Rural internships, will now be applicable for students across all streams. While the government has not made it mandatory, students from 750 higher education institutions will go to rural areas to understand the problems of rural population, under Phase 2 of Unnat Bharat Abhiyan. The programme that was launched on Wednesday will eventually be extended to all higher education institutions.
“To cover the 45000 villages of the country under this movement, we need the participation of 8252 institutions of higher education. Higher education institutions are largely funded by government and people’s money and their participation in this campaign will be a payback time”, said secretary, higher education, R. Subrahmanyam.
Unnat Bharat Abhiyan is a flagship programme of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, with the intention to enrich rural India. The knowledge base and resources of the premier institutions of the country are to be leveraged to bring in transformational change in rural developmental process.
Under the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan 2.0, the institutions have been selected on a Challenge Mode and the scheme has been extended to 750 reputed higher educational institutes – both public and private – of the country. Also, scope for providing Subject Expert Groups and Regional Coordinating Institutes to handhold and guide the participating institutions has been strengthened. IIT Delhi has been designated to function as the National Coordinating Institute for this programme.
Each selected institute would adopt a cluster of villages/panchayats and gradually expand the outreach over a period of time.
Institutes through their faculty and students, will carry out studies of living conditions in the adopted villages, assess the local problems and needs, workout the possibilities of leveraging the technological interventions and the need to improve the processes in implementation of various government schemes, and prepare workable action plans for the selected villages.
The institutes would be expected to closely coordinate with the district administration, elected representatives of panchayat/villages and other stakeholders and will become very much a part of the process of development planning and implementation.
In this process, faculty and students of such institutes would be re-oriented and connected to the rural realities so that their learning and research work also becomes more relevant to the society.
Dr Satya Pal Singh, Minister of State for Human Resource Development appealed to the professors and students of the higher education institutions to motivate the rural public, particularly, the young generations for socio-economic development of the villages through various schemes and initiatives of rural development.