New Delhi: Union Minister of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Giriraj Singh has said that India is moving towards becoming Atmanirbhar Bharat and is exporting medicines, helping neighbouring countries along with successfully running the Covid-19 vaccination drive. “Today, 68-70 per cent of the population is living in rural areas and we are developing 300 Rurban clusters in rural India with 2500 panchayats involved in this,” he added.

Addressing an interactive session on Skilling and Empowerment Initiatives through the FLO Village Industries and Transformation (VIT) Project, organized by FICCI-FLO, Singh said the government is working towards ensuring that by the end of 2022, over 3 crore women will be part of Mission One lakh which will also create opportunities for packaging, branding of their products. Without improving the lives of people in rural areas, we cannot change the real picture of India,” he added.

Commenting on the FLO’s VIT project, Singh said that FLO must set a goal to set-up 30 million women enterprises by 2030 along with their mentoring. “With this, we can create around 150-170 million jobs. FLO should also support these women entrepreneurs by creating marketing linkages, mentoring, and designing along with branding and boost the rural products,” he said.

Ujjwala Singhania, President, FLO (FICCI Ladies Organization), said: “70 per cent of India’s rural population resides in villages. As of 2019, there are a total of 664,369 villages, up from the 649,481 in the 2011 Census of India. It is time to empower the village population and its governments by collecting and sharing important health, nutrition and other socio-economic indicators.” Arun Chawla, Director General, FICCI, said that market access, creating resilient supply chains are the need of the hour for the rural industries. /BI/