Higher Education To The Aid Of Rural India Through Technology
NEW DELHI: Aimed at encouraging higher education institutions to engage with problems of rural India like sanitation and hygiene, water, health and education and to provide appropriate solutions for them, the government's recently launched Unnat Bharat Abhiyan (UBA) can lead to transformational change in the country if the technologies are "relevant, robust and affordable", experts say.
The programme was launched November 11, 2014, National Education Day, which also marked the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first education minister.
"What is being attempted is rural development with appropriate technology intervention. To the extent that the technologies are relevant, robust and affordable, they will lead to transformational change. This is what happened with the mobile phone revolution too," Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT Madras, one of the implementing agencies, told IANS.
Elaborating, S.K. Saha, coordinator, Unnat Bharat Abhiyan Cell (UBAC) at IIT Delhi, told IANS: "The main aim is to take already developed solutions to the rural people and how to create links with them so that problems faced by them can be taken up by the IIT community as their academic problem or otherwise."
Under UBA 18 institutions of higher education have been roped in. These include IITs at Bombay, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Kanpur, Madras, Kharagpur, Mandi, Patna, Roorkee and Ropar, BHU Varanasi and also Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, and Malviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur.
"Unnat Bharat Abhiyaan will connect our institutions of higher education to develop technical solutions to address challenges in rural India," Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani said at the launch.
According to UBA's website, 70 per cent of India's population lives in rural areas, engaged in an agrarian economy with agriculture and allied sectors employing 51 per cent of the workforce but accounting for only 17 per cent of the GDP.
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