Sensitization of Officer Trainees towards Rural Realities:
1. As more than 70 percent of Indian population live in rural areas, so directly or indirectly almost all Officer trainees of central and all India services in some way other have to serve the rural people. A long back it was felt that rural studies should form an important part of inputs of foundational and phase-II course inputs. In this backdrop this Centre is organising village visit programme for foundational course since its inception. As a part of the village visit programme the officer trainees of foundational course are to spend a week or so in the selected villages and learn about the rural realities very closely by studying the village with help of powerful tools and techniques of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) method. In this regard briefing classes on PRA, demonstrations on PRA and film shows on PRA are being held for Officer trainees just before the commencement of village visit programme by the faculties of the Centre and academy with help of guest lectures. Apart from the class inputs on PRA a handbook containing detail guidelines and methodology to study the village life prepared by the Centre is provided to each officer trainees for facilitating the village study. The officer trainees after completion of village study are required to submit individual and group reports to the Centre for evaluation. The most important point is these reports are endowed with valuable information on various aspects of rural areas such as demography, infrastructures, health, education, agriculture, occupational pattern, poverty. Gender issues and Panchyati Raj. So the Centre is putting its best effort to compile state reports on the basis of the Foundational course reports and sending the same to MORD for use in policy formulation and assessment of rural development in general. Organizing village visit programme is a continuing task of the Centre. So, the reorientation and upgradation of village study methodologies, objectives keeping Ministry of rural development requirements for delivering the best to more than 70 crores of India's population in mind is one of the major thrust research areas of the Centre.
2. During the district Training, the IAS probationers are required to conduct survey based village study with the help of questionnaires covering two broad aspects like Socio-economic and Land Reforms in rural areas and to submit two reports entitled as Socio-economic report and Land report. Later on these reports are used to prepare state reports, which are published internally. The major task of the Centre in this regard is to upgrade the quality of questionnaires and methodology of studying rural issues by taking rural dynamics from policy point of view and others into consideration.
