UGC Report on Inter University Center on Rural - Ministry of Rural ...

Employment policies including the EGS should be integrated with land and water and
sustainable development programmes. Such integration being attempted in the late Eighties
was given up later in stand alone policies on “employment generation”. These faulty
approaches need to be given up and linking EGS with agro-climatic land and water
development policies would not only make the programme feasible, but involving stake
holder participation would be a guarantee against corruption.
In each of the problems discussed knowledge is not the bottleneck and so progress can be
fast. A dynamic IUC could play a real role in covering sytemic gaps at the local levels.
2.3 What do we do when knowledge is scattered across many agencies
While development has to be knowledge based one finds that the knowledge is spread
across a large number of institutional categories:
- Agricultural Institutions, ICAR Laboratories etc.
- Technical Institutions, CSIR Laboratories etc.
- Planning / Management Institutions, Institutes of Dev. Studies etc.
- Industries / Business, their bodies like CII, Assoscham etc.
- NGOs, Entrepreneurship Development Institutions etc.
The above categories of agencies and sectors are in addition to the <strong>UGC</strong> sector. The
irony is that many of these departments are ‘hermetically sealed’ and thus we find that these
blissfully isolated knowledge sectors do not always have meaningful interaction among
them. The knowledge economy scenario however demands purposeful interaction among the
above sectors.anetworking is essential.
It is therefore imperative that a platform for making the interaction happen is very
necessary. The Inter University Center for Rural Development may basically be conceived of
in this contest.
The urgent need for multi sectoral interaction at every level is necessary – as
illustrated by the following code from the <strong>Report</strong> of the Farmer’s Commission (2006)
headed by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan.
“A District Technology Consortium approach involving scientist, grass root
institutions, corporate sectors, NGOs, financial institutions and farmers is urgently needed”.
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