A day-long workshop was held in the UPES campus on the various aspects and nuances of cultivating medicinal & aromatic plants, around 50 women from various villages of the Sahaspur Block participating in this workshop included women from ‘Birsani’ ; ‘Jagatpur’, ‘Doonga’ & ‘Thaan Gaon’. Experts imparting extensive training on all technical and commercial aspects of cultivating ‘ Chamomile’, ‘Stevia’, ‘Tulsi’, ‘Sarpgandha’, ‘Aloe Vera’ & ‘lemon Grass’ included Mahender Singh Chauhan, Secretary of “Multiple Action Group for Integrated Rural Development Society” and Shama Chauhan, Head of “Mahilla Jagriti Samiti, Vikasnagar.
Women empowerment and girl child education have always been the focus areas of the University. Empowering women by training them in the area of cultivation of Medicinal & Aromatic plants on a commercial scale is yet another such initiative which has been recently taken up by them.
Arun Dhand, Director –Media Affairs shared that the Department of Science & Technology, Govt of India under their scheme called ‘SEED’ has quite recently entrusted this job to UPES and the University has set up a ‘Women Technology Park’ for this purpose wherein apart from this many other initiatives of empowering rural women have also been initiated. Women are not only being given academic training on cultivation but are also being trained practically in this area for this Green houses and Poly houses have been set up in the Bidholi campus of UPES he informed.
The most heartening part of this endeavor being that that the women faculty of UPES are leading all the initiatives of the “Women Technology Park” which also includes commercially viable products made by re-cycling waste paper and computer assisted training in making commercially viable products from Bamboo.