‘Back to Village’ programme in J&K

‘Back to Village’ programme in J&K

The Back to Village (BTM) program in Jammu and Kashmir is an initiative of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The Government of Jammu and Kashmir has embarked on an ambitious and extensive programme of reaching out to the people at the grassroots level to create in the rural masses an earnest desire for decent standard of living.  

Aim of Back to Village program

1. The program aims to provide educational facilities like primary and secondary level education at facilities sanctioned by local agencies and political entities.
2. The ‘Back to Village’ programme is aimed to involve the people of the state and government officials in a joint effort to deliver the mission of equitable development.
3. The programme is aimed at energizing Panchayats and directing development efforts in rural areas through community participation.

Goals of Back to Village program

The purpose of Back to Village is to make sure the people of Jammu and Kashmir have access to education. Some of main goals of this program are

1. energising panchayats.
2. collecting feedback on the delivery of government schemes and programmes.
3. capturing specific economic potential.
4. undertaking assessment of needs of villages.

Phases of Back to Village program

The Back to Village programme in Kashmir is an idea whose time has come. It aims at bringing back some of our youth towards village life by providing them with training and coaching on IT skills, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, financial management etc. This is something that can help the youth to feel confident about their future and work towards taking their communities forward. A default option of Back to Village is also horticulture training. However the program has to be implement in some major steps, which are

1. Phase I: To understand people’s grievances and demands.
2. Phase-II: It focused on the devolution of powers to panchayats and tried to understand how these panchayats are functioning and what are the grievances and demands
3. Phase-III: It has been designed on the format for grievance redressal.

Features of Back to Village program

The Back to Village project is designed to boost the reputation of the Valley in international tourism, improve the image of the Indian government and ultimately bring more foreign direct investment (FDI) to the state.

As part of the programme, each gazetted officer will be assigned a gram panchayat where he/she will interact and obtain feedback from the panchayat representatives about their concerns, developmental needs and economic potential of the area.