Karnataka: RDPR varsity starts fellowship for youth

GADAG: The Karnataka State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj University (KSRDPRU) in Gadag has launched a fellowship to encourage the youth to participate in the development of their village.
The fellowship is called the Swagrama Fellowship, My Village-My Pride.
To pursue the fellowship, candidates must be from a village and should have a concern and interest in developing the village where they were born and raised. This has to be done through self-employment. The fellowship has been introduced by the university in collaboration with the Abdul Nazir Sab Institute for Rural Development, Study Chair of Chanakya University, Pagnapawaha and Kuvempu University as well as Youth for Seva.
Vishnukant Chatpalli, the vice-chancellor of KSRDPRU, said: “We are trying our best to encourage rural youths to be involved in the development of their village. The candidates will be selected based on their interest and plan for developing the village.”
He said: “After selecting the candidates, the university and others who have joined hands with us will give them all the support and guidance to improve their villages. As it is a group fellowship, we need at least two persons to take up a material and non-material development project for their village. They can also involve a third person, who is not from the village but working elsewhere in the country but he or she is interested to do something for village development.”
Chatpalli said that the fellowship aims to develop models for a village according to the nature of the village. It aims at creating a self-reliant community through inter-dependence and co-operation.
He added that developing a conceptual framework and tools for village development could help in expanding the experiment at the national level.
Mentoring will be provided through experts and organisations that bring the necessary knowledge, skills and role models for each team. Villagers themselves are the agents of change, and the responsibility of the fellows is to facilitate this process of people-centered change, he said
He said that people who are already involved in the development of their village or those who are outside the village and involved in various fields and are interested in contributing to their village can take up this fellowship.
The fellowship is for three years. The first year involves in-depth and wide-ranging activities and the next two will be for mentoring and guidance. The candidates will be given a monthly stipend of Rs 5,000.