Our Training Centre “Arivalayam” is located in the hills and amidst the forest areas of the Sathamangalam range that are a part of the Western Ghats of India. In this border area between the State of Tamilnadu and Karnataka, we have two campuses. We built them up gradually between the mid-1980s and 1990s. As we deepened our involvement and experience in enabling rural communities to build and manage their own institutions and development programmes, we recognized the need to invest systematically in the capacity building of these village level organizations. In the process of developing training modules and conducting training programmes, we also realized that the participants - most of whom were women – needed to get away from their neighborhoods in order to get some uninterrupted time to invest in their own growth. This was our provocation to establish the Rural Training Centre in Talamalai and Arepalayam of Talavadi block in Erode District. Over time, the centres have also developed as locations of residential training for people from other Development Organizations, Government and Non-Governmental, from India and abroad – seeking to learn from the experiences of Myrada.
In Erode District, Myrada manages a Krishi Vigyan Kendra (Farm Science Centre). Arivalayam Rural Training Centre also serves as an Institutional Farm and the venue to host a wide variety of meetings and training programmes on farming technologies and farm management. The Kendra focuses on Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA).
For the communities with whom we are working, our training modules are based on the knowledge and skills we are trying to strengthen in the field. For participants from other development organizations, our approaches are currently based on three major principles:
We offer training only in those areas where we have adequate in-house field experiences that have resulted in self learnt lessons-both positive and negative-that are worth sharing with others.
We do not issue an Annual Training Calendar. Our programmes are offered only in response to specific requests that we received, so that the training modules can be customized to meet the particular requirements of the requesting organization
The trainee group from any single organization be not smaller than 5 or 6 persons, and preferably between 15 and 30. The minimum size is based on our observation that unless there is a critical mass from a single organization, lone participants find it difficult to bring about any changes in their own organizations on the basis of what they have seen and learnt at Myrada. The cap on the maximum size is suggested for practical reasons of promoting good participation, avoiding over-crowding in field visits, and keeping the other logistics comfortable.
The areas in which we have experiences that we can share with other development organizations are:
Self Help Affinity Groups: Concept, characteristics, capacity building, book keeping and documentation, training of trainers, group grading, vision building, use of NAB-Yukti software for data consolidation.
Community Managed Resource Centres: Concept, characteristics, capacity building, book keeping and documentation, training of trainers, grading, vision building, financial strengthening.
Watershed development: Concept, micro-planning, building and strengthening watershed management associations, training of trainers, implementation and monitoring of action plans.
Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA): Effective utilization of farm resources, extension methods for effective outreach, details of various technologies.
Participatory Rural Appraisal : Use of basic PRA (PRA) techniques and Appreciative Inquiry process.
Strengthening management in Non-Governmental Organizations: Vision building, action planning, maintaining books and records, stator and compliance auditing, organizational scanning, staff development, gender sensitization, networking.
