Times of India | 1 week ago | 13-05-2022 | 01:13 am
Panaji: Around five years ago, the Union education ministry, under Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, decided that higher education institutes should adopt colleges and play a role in their growth. Assagao’s Dnyanprassark Mandal’s College and Research Centre (DMC) was among the first batch of 338 colleges to be chosen across India to implement this scheme. DMC, as a result, selected the villages of Hassapur, Chandel, Alorna and Kasarvarnem in Pernem taluka and Assagao, where the college is located, for adoption. The college is now focused on skill development of villagers to make them economically self-sufficient. Unnat Bharat Abhiyan coordinator for DMC, Rajesh Pednekar, said that helping women’s self-help groups from these villages to enhance their income is a major part of the programme run by the college. Recently, nearly 140 women from these self-help groups learnt from entrepreneur Yogesh Kapadi on how to prepare eco-friendly packaging for their products. “Our college was among the first to be chosen by the Union ministry to adopt villages based on our past work in the community. We chose four villages from relatively less developed areas of Pernem taluka, besides Assagao, as the college is located here. We see a major employment opportunity for the villages of Pernem as the Mopa airport is coming up there,” DMC principal D B Arolkar said. He said a survey is presently on to identify youth from the villages who can be employed at the airport and the skills they will require to match the needed job profiles at the Mopa project. “We are working in some key focus areas. We are teaching women of self-help groups how to package and increase the value of their products. As part of improving financial literacy, we are also connecting them to bank officials to get them to know the different schemes they can benefit from. Our third focus area is health and hygiene,” Arolkar said. While pushing for growth, the institute is careful to focus on eco-friendly initiatives like cloth bags for stores in the villages. Former sarpanch of Hassapur-Chandel panchayat, Santosh Malik, said that a change is already being seen in the village due to the work of DMC students and faculty members over the last five years.
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