The Centre for Equity, Justice and Empowerment (CEJE) at YASHADA has been conducting several training programmes to help build capacity for implementation of the very crucial activity of the government.
Training Needs Analysis conducted by YASHADA identified training requirements for gram sevaks and Village Development Officers (VDOs) to help prepare proposals, support, implement, monitor, and evaluate people’s participation. The gram sevaks and VDOs were also found to be crucial to ensure sustainability of the scheme.
More than 35,000 villages in Maharashtra have dalit vastis and require appropriate capacity-building. The Academy has provided a 3-day training programme to gram sevaks and VDOs to enhance local community coordination with various government departments to ensure that need-based projects are identified, developed, approved and implemented.
YASHADA’s initiatives will help the government ensure better coverage for beneficiaries of the Dalit Vasti Sudhar Yojana. The Academy will also provide support through training to help increase target villages and coverage period.
Six 3-day training programmes were conducted during January-March 2008.
Faculty from the Academy, Dr. Dhanraj Patil, Assistant Professor (020-25608226) and Smt. Anita Jadhav, Research Officer (020-25608276) are coordinating the training programmes.
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YASHADA has been conducting an on-field action project as the monitoring & evaluation agency for resettlement and rehabilitation of project affected families (PAFs) of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Narmada River. The project enables documentation of status of resettlement of declared PAFs in Maharashtra in nine resettled villages. The project has also developed a very detailed database of PAFs and has conducted a comprehensive socio-economic study and assessment through field surveys.
The Relief and Rehabilitation Department of the Government of Maharashtra provided the mandate to the Academy to conduct the studies, monitor and evaluate the resettlement and rehabilitation and develop the database of PAFs.
Consultations with stakeholders and officials, NGOs and PAFs have helped the study remain neutral and without bias. Nine villages were studied during 2007-2008 by the project team. Socio-economic studies were completed for three villages while family-specific database and documentation was finalized for nine villages during this period.
The project team, in February 2008, has finalized the interactive web-based ASP networked software to analyse the database. The software has been appreciated by the Narmada Control Authority and the Government of Mahrashtra as a tool for better monitoring and planning of the rehabilitation process. Contact Mr Sumedh Gurjar, Additional Director (020-25608149) for information.