Jairam Ramesh lays the foundation stone for the community development centre in Digha on Wednesday. (Gautam Dey)

Ranchi, Sept. 13: The first of the proposed 10 employment and skill training centres in Saranda will come up at Pathalgadi Digha village, 20km from block headquarters Manoharpur, in the next five months.

With the aim of equipping local youths with skills and etiquette necessary to find employment, IL&FS Cluster Development Initiative Limited, an agency involved in training rural youths in several parts of the country, has now been formally roped in for establishing the facility.

The training unit will be housed within the Integrated Community Development Centre (Vikas Bhawan) that is coming up over a 26,000sqft area in the village. The foundation stone for the community development centre, estimated to cost around Rs 6 crore, was laid by Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh during his visit to Saranda yesterday.

Raj Dravid, chief operating officer (skill group) of the IL&FS initiative said although they had trained a few youths from Saranda in Ranchi, they had now been formally asked to set up a centre in Digha.

“Having a centre here will be more effective as it will reduce our burden of identifying people and taking them to Ranchi. They will be trained right in their homes, which would encourage others to relate to and join the motivated groups and that is the reason we readily agreed to this proposal,” he said.

“We are in the process of scanning the abilities of people in Saranda by interacting and visiting the area. Since people are living below poverty line, they are hardly literate and hence picking the right training module which suits their interest and offers scope is imperative,” he said, adding that some of the trades which were discussed with the minister yesterday included training for welding, electrical repairs and tailoring.

IL&FS had been mandated by the Union ministry of rural development to conduct placement linked skill training for rural BPL youth in left-wing extremism-affected districts of the state. The initiative is operating nine centres in Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Simdega, Hazaribagh and Palamau.

“In Ranchi, we have one apparel training centre where we have trained candidates from Saranda region. Of the 1,798 youths trained there, 113 candidates were from Saranda,” said Rishu Ravi, IL &FS representative in Jharkhand.

The candidates trained in operating sewing machines had been provided placement in large apparel companies in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

An official involved in the project maintained the community development centre in Digha will have 26 shelters of 26x40 feet dimension each.