By Sunil Sonkar
Mussoorie, 31 May: A college going girl from a small village of Haridwar district loves to draw aipan and traditional arts of Uttarakhand. She wanted to enhance her skills and pursue a career in this field but didn’t get proper guidance and support to achieve her dream. It is not just a single story, there are thousands of students like her in our state who have immense talent but due to lack of knowledge about career opportunities and family pressure they don’t get to explore their abilities and end up being a part of bandwagon. The government of Uttarakhand after realising the unused potential of these youngsters collaborated with ‘Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII)’ and started “Devbhoomi Udyamita Yojana” to induce the entrepreneurial skills in the young generation of the state so that they can get proper channel to enhance their skills and involve themselves in the employment generation process. This programme is being conducted in the higher education institutions of the state in various steps. With the objective of encouraging young masses to explore their capabilities and enhance their skills to find the path of self-employment and emerge as an entrepreneur this yojana has been helping the students at every step of their journey to become self-reliant.
This young girl found a new perspective to develop her hobby into a career opportunity through this yojana when she registered herself in the twelve-day entrepreneurship development programme by EDII at the college. In 12 days, she got a clear vision about what she needs to do to develop her artistic skills. Now with the basic idea of business planning she has been continuously working towards her dream of opening her own art enterprise. There are many students like her in the different colleges of Uttarakhand who have discovered their hidden qualities of entrepreneurship under the programme. In those 12 days, students learnt the importance of self – employment, formation of a business idea, planning of business, selection of product, market and target customers, etc. The specialised resource persons are playing the key role in providing students the guidance they need and helping students to realize their capabilities. Under their guidance many students have started working to establish their own business units. This programme has invoked positive changes in the students by motivating them towards self-employment and entrepreneurship. It is also helping the students of backward and hilly regions by providing them with specialised mentors and a platform to explore their abilities.
Programmes like “Devbhoom Udyamita Yojana” are very important as students need proper guidance and motivation to follow their dreams otherwise, they get distracted easily without any guidance. This initiative by the government of Uttarakhand is benefitting the state in many ways by reducing the problem of unemployment among the educated youth. If implemented properly at every stage, it has the potential to become a game changing step towards the development of an entrepreneurial society, and as a growth catalyst of the economy.
