Here's a wonderful opportunity for Andhra Pradesh students pursuing courses in various professional and non-professional colleges. As part of a novel scheme, nearly 15.70 lakh students will be involved in community service. This is being done so that students develop the ability to spot all that ails the society and works towards helping and giving feedback to the government, which will, in turn, help the latter develop better policies.
This will be executed by the Community Planning and Development Board — the organisation that was created by the state government which will be advising it on community development by involving students from engineering law and other degree colleges. Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education Society (APSCHE) will instruct this organisation to conduct surveys and develop the database required by involving educational institutions.
In each and every mandal (revenue block), one college will be identified as a nodal agency and for a cluster of mandals, one resource centre will be identified. On the same lines, there will be similar centres at the revenue division and district levels as well. The task will be assigned by the board and students at different levels will be involved. The groups of students will be required to collect all the data pertaining to the villages of that particular mandal with the help of a questionnaire, which will be specifically designed for this purpose. The next step will be studying and analysing the data, which will be done with the assistance of village/ward secretariat and the faculty members of the college. The output needs to be discussed with the people and the community felt-needs will have to be drafted.
“After consolidating data on all the issues found by these centres, the data will be grouped into categories, following a series of discussions with the social engineers, scientists, professors and NGOs on how to tackle them,” said K Hemachandra Reddy, Chairman, APSCHE, as per a report in Hindustan Times. “Unlike previous community-based programmes like National Service Scheme (NSS), wherein, only interested students participate, we have designed this programme to involve all the students by integrating it with Choice Based Credit System (CBCS),” he added.
The task that will be assigned to each student can be connected to any issues, from infrastructure and health to education and environment. During their summer vacations, students will need to dedicate 180 hours of their time to earn credits within CBCS. In the form of dissertations, the students need to submit their reports to the board who will submit them to the government along with recommendations.
