PANCHAYATI SWARAJ

Second Freedom; when my village becomes self-responsible

SixFreedoms...3Cultural...3.2SkillSets
3.2 Skill Sets
The village must ensure that there are enough skills in the village to ensure two things. First, each individual must be skilled enough in one way or the other so that if and when he is confronted with the need for earning his livelihood, he must not have any difficulty. And second, the totality of skills available in the village (in its various citizens) must be adequate to provide all the basic services needed for the village to thrive. The village must strive to ensure that there is no monopoly in any of the required skills.
Relevance:         Seen from an individual angle, when individuals have skill sets that are relevant ... to participation in various manufacturing units or services, they can be confident that they can make themselves useful to society and earn their livelihood easily without depending on doles. From the village community standpoint, the ability of a village to run systems within the village depends on the spectrum of skills available among its members. The greater availability of such skill sets in a village directly means the existence of better services for the members of a village.
Detailed Rationale:         A productive and prosperous society is one which makes available, to its people, various goods and services ... that improve the quality of living. At the community level, this includes a wide array of skills not restricted to ‘job’ skills. A lot of it consists of those services that are rendered for free in families, in friends’ circles, in village festivals, in inter-village competitions, etc. Some of these are included in calculating the GDP of a nation while others are not. However, even those which are not counted serve a similar purpose—of increasing the levels of prosperity of a nation. The same applies to a village too. The availability of these skills is therefore a holistic estimate of how prosperous a village truly is. Skills are required to run the political, executive and judicial system and economy-based systems. Better skills result in better productivity, improved marketing, better services, efficient processing of farm produce, improved health care and so on. All these skills have more than one dimension. Many appear as skills of the hand, but they go in coordination with skills of the mind. Very often, they need to be accompanied with skills in interpersonal interactions.

Therefore, a village may be considered free only if its members possess a minimum spectrum of skills required for services in the village and in the present socio-political-economic environment.
Success Stories and Action:
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There is a requirement of conscious effort when planning for the skills of a village, and it has to be done by the village management itself. Skills that are not available in a village should be made available either through borrowing people from outside or by sending out village members to learn relevant skills from trainers and training institutes outside. Having obtained the relevant skills, there are different ways by which such skills can be transferred down the generations, and the leaders of a village must develop a plan to ensure that the entire spectrum of skills is available in the subsequent generations as well.

Even for upgrading skills, the initiative must come from the villagers themselves. For example, if a teacher has been working in the village for some time, it would be nice if the teacher gets some additional coaching on counseling. In such cases, the village itself must sponsor and send the teacher for training. Farming, equipment maintenance, animal husbandry, business skills training, medicine, law, traditional medicine and water management are all areas in which people must be sent for higher training in a timely manner so that there is continuous improvement. The community must understand the importance of this and bear the costs.

As for the youngsters, who are in the process of being educated, the village must ensure that they have the opportunity to pick up the requisite skills needed for success in the future. This can either be integrated into the school syllabus or there can be separate training centers for it.

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