Skill building for rural populace:

gelling of formal and non-formal education systems:

linking training to economic and market opportunities

 

Introduction:

Skill building for rural areas is a neglected aspect in our educational schemes. It needs to be flagged as a high priority program in order to take care of growing unemployment.

 

The formal channels of education cannot cope up with growing needs of skill building The non-formal channels which still exist must be tapped as a supplementary or alternative program.

 

With rapid modernization many erstwhile rural skills have either become redundant or need an up-gradation to gel with modern requirements. This is possible by creating a system of recognition and authentication of skills and by allowing people to come in and go out of the formal system at their convenience. Simultaneously,� linking with financial and marketing arrangements will yield the desired results.

 

SHG promotion has caught up in many rural areas, at a time when TRYSEM has been taken out of IRDP. It needs to be reintroduced. In absence of productive activities, there is no scope to multiply the money collected under SHG initiative.

 

This paper, therefore, has 2 parts, Skill-bulding and activity-linking.

 

Part I : Skill building:

1] Identify skills available with rural women� eg (i) knowledge of herbs (ii) cooking and packaging of nutritional food (iii) animal husbandry.

2] Allow its quick evaluation by informal methods. �This should enable them for enrolling for short term vocational courses which must including building up of managerial and marketing skills.

3] Such course designs need to be undertaken, and maintained with the least phase-lag with changing requirements of different groups.

4] A �suit yourself� type of examination system can be tried out. This would be almost impossible when computers were not available; now it must be adopted even in our formal system to ease out the tension on students teachers and parents.

5] Start skill building lessons on TV. Their success and effectiveness should be monitored through end results.

6] Identify existing govt Institutions and schemes to run the short duration training courses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 2 : Activity-linking:

Following is a range of new technologies or methodologies that have come up in rural areas and provide good employment/market opportunities to women groups possessing requisite vocational skills.

i)                    hand pump repairing.

ii)                   Soil conservation activities, check-dams, nalla-bunding etc.

iii)                 Afforestation, waste land development, forest-nurseries

iv)                 Silk reeling

v)                  small scale foundries

vi)                 repair and maintenance of gobar gas plants

vii)               packaging of horticultural produce

viii)              Running computer kiosks

ix)                 Preparing herbal potions.

x)                  Preparing supplementary nutritional food, its packaging and management

xi)                 Tribal art of ornament making can be gelled with fashion technology.

xii)               Running gobar gas based domestic generators.

xiii)              Wormi-culture.

xiv)             Organic farming.

xv)               Washing machine kiosks

xvi)             Jaggary producing plants (50 tonne per day crushing capacity)

xvii)            Bee keeping

xviii)          Rearing silk moths

xix)             Artificial insemination

xx)               3 wheeler driving in semi-urban areas