To intensify the efforts on good governance and sustainable agriculture, six Saksham partners from the Uttar Pradesh Cluster attended a two-day (3–4 March 2023) training and reflection program at Agra, Uttar Pradesh. This training was designed to capacitate the field mobilizers on community mobilization, the Gram Panchayat Development Plan, a social audit on good governance, and packages of practices for sustainable agriculture/integrated farming.

The Saksham program is operational with 18 partners from Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Rajasthan to empower the community, especially the women, to participate more in the grass-roots governance and decision-making process. It also supports smallholder and marginal farmers to increase food availability through a campaign on good governance and sustainable agriculture. The program has taken the initiative to bring transparency to local governance and sensitize people about sustainable agriculture practices.

Regional Forum Director of Uttar Kshetriya Samaj Vikas Kendra, Fr. Pious Philip, motivated participants to help the village community avail of the benefits of the schemes based on their eligibility under good governance to make their lives better. The role of the Saksham team is to make people Atamnirbhar (self-reliant), Sugam (easy), and Sulabh (accessible) with regard to good governance. Sharing about sustainable agriculture, he said that due to the excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pest repellents, on the one hand, the production of our farmers has deteriorated and, on the other, the community is getting affected by untoward sickness. Therefore, we need to promote organic farming to produce good food and also protect soil health.

The training was facilitated by the Caritas India team to introduce the dynamics of good governance and sustainable/integrated farming. The training helped the animators grasp the technical nuances of good governance and the farming system. The inputs shared during the training session will be made into a package of practices for the animators when they visit and meet the community in the villages.

The training acts as a refresher for the participants, coupled with field experiences to inculcate the ideas to reach out to the people and make them aware and mobilize them for a better governance system in the panchayat. Once people get aware and mobilized, only a movement as a response can trigger the system. The training has bridged the gap between the practical knowledge and field experience glitches of each animator working on good governance.

It was an eye-opener for the animators to gain clarity and spell out the people’s problems and solutions. It instils confidence in them to discharge their roles while with the community and helps in sharing the program themes to empower them to enable local governance in the panchayat. When the system is good, the community enjoys its freedom and benefits of it. This training provided a platform for the animators to see the nuances of local governance through the prism of their field experiences and evaluate their own performance over the past months. With this new insight, the animators will set forth to bring a change in the local governance and become the change-makers in the system.