Dr. M V Rao, IAS, Principal Secretary, Govt. of West Bengal, Department of Sundarban Affairs and Managing Director, West Bengal Cooperative Marketing Federation gave a lecture on “Rural Development Challenges, Skills, and Enterprise creation” on 23rd April 2016 at IPE .
The lecture was initiated with the kind of challenges rural youth is facing mainly on the aspects of poor returns on agriculture and migration of farmers to urban areas. Also spoke on the aspects of poor employment opportunities in rural areas.
He spoke on the steps taken to protect the interests of small and marginal growers of paddy in West Bengal as M D of West Bengal Marketing Federation. He started going to the village to understand the ground realities and to start the paddy procurement immediately after the harvest of paddy. Extending Minimum Support Price (MSP) procurement at the village level through PACS immediately after the harvest of crops gave good returns to the farmers for their output.
He has shared his experiences and the employment generating activities taken up under Sunderban Area Development as Principal Secretary of the Department. The department gave the list of rural employment generating skills like repairs of motorcycles, mobiles, tailoring, beautician etc. and the youth was asked to decide in which area they are interested.
The training was given only on those areas where they are interested and therefore they could see the seriousness in the learning and building career in that field. The department has also given tool kits required to take up the profession immediately after the training. They have also started providing employment in the areas of their learning including organized retailing and IT sector.
The department has also been utilizing using the services of other Institutes like ICAR institutes in providing training programs on the aspects of value added products production from locally available raw materials like jute in making bags, cloth etc. The talk was highly inspiring and enlightening on the innovative ideas in the generation of rural employment.
