Sreelatha Menon Fellowship of apathy

The Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellows are being pampered with funds to serve for just two years

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The Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellows scheme, announced two years ago, sounded like a novel way to connect educated youth to the problems of backward rural areas hit by Maoist violence. But it is now surrounded by questions as its financial size is now larger than the problem it seeks to solve and is hardly appropriate at a time when the government is talking of austere spending.

It was the brain child of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), which, in a project with Unicef, had appointed development facilitators to work with local administrations. TISS suggested the same formula to the rural development ministry to help implement rural development programmes hand-in-hand with local administrations.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh lapped up the idea. Under the scheme, people with professional degrees in medicine, law, etc or simple post-graduates were to be recruited and trained by TISS and were to get salaries of Rs 82,000 each unlike the more modestly paid development facilitators under the TISS-Unicef project. The overall expense on them was about Rs 6-7 crore a year. The fellowship is for two years after which they are under no obligation to serve the government.

The scheme is being run by the Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology (Capart), a wing of the ministry, which is on its way to being scrapped.

As if hiring and training-expensive fellows to assist district collectors for two years was not enough, Capart and TISS are working towards adding a few more frills to the fellowship programme. And this is being done even without any independent evaluation of the scheme mandatory for it after the first year.

TISS has developed an online post-graduation (PG) course in development practice just for these fellows. And the cost of this course is close to Rs 3 crore just for one batch of students.

The course and curriculum are on the agenda for discussion for the executive committee (EC) of Capart next week. Vibha Gupta, a member of the EC, says the fellowship itself is not a great idea as the funds would have been better utilised in empowering youth in the violence-affected districts. "Why should the government spend Rs 8 crore on a group of people each year when there is no guarantee that they would serve the government?" Once the ministry decides on something, then Capart can hardly do anything about it, she says, admitting ignorance of the PG frill.

K S Gopal, an activist and economist, blames TISS and Capart officials for the PG programme. "TISS is badly in need of money and has designed this course for its own development, he says. The fellowship programme had a good intention of attracting talent from Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management. But somehow, it failed to get such people and now, it is pouring in more funds to justify the scheme," Gopal adds.

Ashwini Kumar, another member of the Capart EC, and a faculty of TISS, says he was aware of the course being introduced till he saw the agenda for the coming EC meeting.

The selections for the second batch have not started, though the year is close to its end giving the impression that officials in the ministry have developed cold feet over the ambitious programme. The irrelevance of the expensive PG course for these fellows is obvious to anyone as the scheme does not bind fellows to the government in any way. So, all money spent on them does not help the government in any way. This is as obvious as the fact that the youth in the Naxal-affected districts rather than youth from professional colleges badly need empowerment in the form of skills, higher education and other facilities.

As for attracting youth to development, it is hardly true that people with professional degrees are required to solve the country's problems unless, of course, they work in their areas of specialisation. Nor is a salary of Rs 82,000 needed to attract people genuinely interested in working for fellow beings.