Aiming to eradicate unemployment among rural youth in India
The National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR) and Syngenta Foundation India (SFI) have initiated Agri Entrepreneurship (AE) model for the eradication of the unemployment among rural youth and focus on improving the standard of the general condition of the farmers of rural India.
The National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR) is an autonomous body under the Union Ministry of Rural Development and is the premier national center of excellence in rural development and Panchayati Raj.
What’s Agri Entrepreneurship (AE) model?
1- This Agri Entrepreneurship model mobilizes services like credit and market linkage, access to high-quality inputs and crop advisory for the farmers or the group of farmers.
2- This model is currently in force across seven states. There are almost 580 AEs which are associated with SFI and serving about 75,000 farmers. It is expected to spread over to other parts of the country in the coming days. State Rural Livelihood Missions are taking great interest in transforming SHG women as AEs.
3- The AE Enterprise platform is looking to optimize all processes starting from the selection of AE to the formulation of their day-to-day business activities and farmer interactions. This will give rise to faster growth, greater transparency and facilitating the creation of networks for seamless knowledge transfer.
4- According to Dr. W.R. Reddy, Director General NIRD&PR, today farmers of the country need commodity-centric experts in the form of service providers who could bring them knowledge related to crop science, input services, value addition and market linkages as a one-stop solution to the farmer.
5- Dr. Reddy also added that there’s effort on the part of NIRD&PR with collaboration from SFI for promoting the AEs all over the country to spread in a scalable proposition in the next five years which will provide market-ready services to the farmers while being able to generate revenue for themselves.
6- The AE program will train the rural youth in Agri-Business Management and soft skills guided by digital tools to effortlessly provide agriculture extension and engage small farmers. Based on the principles of micro-learning, the content is created in-house and accredited by agriculture experts. Presently, the content for the advisory is available in 5 local languages. Kuza technologies are the technology partner to this initiative which offers integrated technology solution at every stage of the AE model from a selection of AEs to impact assessment.
7- Nowadays, rural communities across India are under severe difficulty which is putting agriculture-dependent households in hardship. So, this is a well-thought plan to de-risk agriculture and improve its status as a livelihood. This can be only possible by building strategies for the rise of productivity, value addition, and market linkages for the produce of small primary producers.
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