India has one of the youngest populations with about 600 million younger than 25 and more than 60% residing in the villages. With this India is facing the biggest challenge of employment generation as the economy will generate jobs for only half of this population as estimated by the UNDP.
As urban India strives to emerge as the next superpower, rural India continues on a never-ending journey of poverty, exploitation and in some cases extinction. The ground realities add unpleasant hues to an otherwise shining picture of India’s progress. To make India’s growth story a truly inclusive one, it becomes imperative to help 833 million people residing in rural India, overcome their developmental challenges.
Rural India continues to suffer in the absence of access to adequate productive assets, connectivity, intellectual and financial resources. More than 85% of rural families own less than 2 hectares of land, which are sub-divided and scattered in several locations. These small holdings coupled with inability to invest in necessary agricultural inputs and adoption of advanced technologies means lower productivity leading to poverty which serves as the basis for various social problems.
We are working in the aquaculture sector as the employment generating activity. This sector has witnessed a threefold increase in the last decade with just 15% utilization or resources. There is ample scope to generate employment through this sector as there is a dearth of manpower in this sector. Aquaculture is the only hope left to fulfil the protein requirement of the world’s population. This sector is generating 32 lakh fisheries job opportunities in India and less fisheries graduates and hence industry is facing shortage of manpower.
The main reasons are:
- This form of culture is comparatively new as against the age old practice of aquaculture, poultry etc.
- Poor understanding leads to poor planning and implementation. The government administration itself is less equipped with the technology. Inadequate training programs.
-Lack of vocational training in aquaculture to generate the manpower necessary for the sector.
- The only education in aquaculture is available at the Fisheries Universities which are few for the vast rural population.
- Inability of the Government to popularise this sector.
- Due to lack of knowledge the banks perceive this as a high risk sector thus denying the entrepreneurs financial aid.
- The common resources utilization makes it impossible for the qualified fisheries graduates to take it up as the business enterprise thus denying them with the hands on field experience.
The model that we had tried is meeting the trained fisheries graduates to take up fish or prawns culture with the partnership of the village youth. This helped them university graduates gain field experience and demonstrated the fish culture practices for the entire crop cycle. This is a scalable model as this way we are generating employment for both the fresh university graduates with scientific knowledge and rural youth.
Dr. Vaishali Joshi