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IITs, NITs, IIMs to help develop rural areas
With an aim of developing rural India, 89 districts are being provided with technical and managerial solutions by institutes like IITs, NITs and IIMs under the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan scheme.
With an aim of developing rural India, 89 districts are being provided with technical and managerial solutions by institutes like IITs, NITs and IIMs under the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan scheme.
The UBA is a flagship scheme of the HRD ministry, being coordinated by IIT Delhi under which 89 districts have been adopted by around 45 institutes of higher learning across India.
On Friday, HRD Minister Smriti Irani will inaugurate the UBA cell at IIT-D.
The mission of Unnat Bharat Abhiyan is to enable higher educational institutions to work with the people of rural India in identifying development challenges and evolving appropriate solutions for accelerating sustainable growth, officials said.
“Each institute is to adopt village clusters and work closely with district officials to develop technological solutions specific to the needs of people,” said V K Vijay, national coordinator of the program.
IIT-D has adopted eight districts under the scheme as of now. “Solutions should need to be specific to requirements. For example, IIT-D has adopted a district in Agra where locals are engaged in potato farming. Their concern is to grow potatoes with high yield. So our UBA team is developing a technology to evaluate potatoes for high yield,” he said
The idea is to develop solutions based on interactions with local people and authorities like District Collector, gramsabha and gram panchayats. “Till now IITs, IIMs, NITs and central universities were mostly working for urban areas but with this scheme we will transfer the focus on rural areas,” said Vijay.
