Concept of the day – READY Yojana and ARYA
Student READY (Rural Entrepreneurship Awareness Development Yojana) programme is a new initiative of Indian Council of Agricultural Research to reorient graduates of Agriculture and allied subjects for ensuring and assuring employability and develop entrepreneurs for emerging knowledge intensive agriculture.
This envisages the introduction of the programme in all the Agricultural Universities as an essential prerequisite for the award of degree to ensure hands on experience and practical training depending on the requirements of respective discipline and local demands.
This programme includes five components
- Experiential Learning
- Rural Awareness Works Experience
- In-Plant Training / Industrial attachment
- Hands-on training (HOT) / Skill development training
- Students Projects
All these components are interactive and are conceptualized for building skills in project development and execution, decision-making, individual and team coordination, approach to problem solving, accounting, quality control, marketing and resolving conflicts, etc. with end to end approach.
The Rural Awareness Works Experience (RAWE) helps the students primarily to understand the rural situations, status of technologies adopted by farmers, prioritize the farmers problems and to develop skills and attitude of working with farm families for overall development in rural area.
Experiential Learning (EL) helps the student to develop competence, capability, capacity building, acquiring skills, expertise and confidence to start their own enterprise and turn “Job Creators instead of Job Seekers”. This is a step towards Earn while Learn concept.
About ARYA
Realizing the importance of rural youth in agricultural development of the country, ICAR has initiated a programme on “Attracting and Retaining Youth in Agriculture”. The objectives of ARYA project are
- To attract and empower the Youth in Rural Areas to take up various Agriculture, allied and service sector enterprises for sustainable income and gainful employment in selected districts.
- To enable the Farm Youth to establish network groups to take up resource and capital intensive activities like processing, value addition and marketing.
- To demonstrate functional linkage with different institutions and stakeholders for convergence of opportunities available under various schemes/program for sustainable development of youth.
ARYA project will be implemented in 25 States through KVKs, one district from each State. In one district, 200-300 rural youths will be identified for their skill development in entrepreneurial activities and establishment of related micro-enterprise units.
KVKs will involve the Agricultural Universities and ICAR Institutes as Technology Partners. At KVKs also one or two enterprise units will be established so that they serve as entrepreneurial training units for farmers.
The purpose is to establish economic models for youth in the villages so that youths get attracted in agriculture and overall rural situation is improved.
Skill development of rural youths will help in improving their confidence levels and encourage them to pursue farming as profession, generate additional employment opportunities to absorb under employed and unemployed rural youth in secondary agriculture and service related activities in rural areas. The concurrent monitoring, evaluation and mid-term correction will be an integral part of project implementation.
