Funding rural religious fairs and festivals is a key tool for marketing products in rural India, which accounts for 72 per cent of the country's billion plus population, said an official of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).
"We have been sponsoring many rural fairs to promote our products and the responses have been tremendous. We must use this tool to market any product," said M C Sahu, assistant general manager (AGM) of the bank, at a workshop on rural non-farm job opportunities.
The rural population are connected with these fairs emotionally and thus, the response of these investments will be effective, he added. The bank has been sponsoring many religious festivals and fairs of Dhenkanal, Angul, Bargarh and other districts to showcase its various loan schemes to provide means of livelihood through agriculture and allied sector.
Besides employment opportunity in agricultural sector, the state has embarked upon a plan to train rural youth in finding a job in non-farm sector, with an eye on rapid growth of urbanisation. Odisha Rural Development and Marketing Society (ORMAS) has been selected as the nodal agency to carry on this project and the trainings can be offered in various trades.
"The budgetary allocation for the skill development training programme has been increased by around three times from Rs 13,000 per person earlier, because the government wants to focus on creating employment opportunity in non-farm areas. The agency interested to train the rural youths in a particular trade, must provide them placements for at least six months to get the allocation," said K K Jha, deputy chief executive of marketing with ORMAS in the workshop-'Insight Into Indian States', organised by Center for Youth and Social Development (CYSD)
The trainings can be offered in as many as 42 trades including hospitality, mobile repairing, security guard, retail management, housekeeping and diamond polishing etc.
While Odisha has plans to invest more than Rs 10,000 crore for creating job opportunity in rural areas, Rajasthan has earmarked about Rs 7,000 crore. Still, there are many loopholes and gaps in implementation of these schemes because of lack of experiences. CUTS International, a Jaipur-based NGO plans to open a website, which will contain all successful and unsuccessful stories in creating non-farm job opportunities in four states--Rajasthan, Odisha, Assam and Karnataka.
"The website, which will be launched this month, will collate all data and documents related to different schemes of state and national government in these four states within two years' time. By dissemination of the information, the governments can decide which scheme to continue and which not to, thereby curbing the fiscal deficit," said Madhu Sudan Sharma, project coordinator of CUTS.
The website is being developed with the help of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and for Odisha, Center for Youth and Social Development (CYSD) is the partnering agency, he said.
UNDP said, in past few years, the focus on welfare based rural job creation program has witnessed a sea change along with the changing environment.
'There is a paradigm shift from the welfare based employment schemes to the capacity building programmes in the rural non-farm sector," said Ambika Prasad Nanda, State Programme Officer, UNDP, in the workshop.
