UPSC Exam Preparation: Topic of the Day – North East Centre for Technology Application and Research (NECTAR)
In 2012, North East Centre for Technology Application and Research (NECTAR) was set up under Department of Science and Technology as an autonomous society for assisting the North-Eastern region of the country in ensuring applications of appropriate technologies for development in the areas of employment generation, tele-schooling using cutting-edge MESHNET solutions, planning and monitoring biodiversity, infrastructure planning and development, horticulture, telemedicine, watershed management, telemedicine, horticulture etc. through utilization of local products/resources and resulting in associated skill development.
- NECTAR, though, isn’t all about bamboo covers “local and natural resources” of the region comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
- Apart from providing technical expertise to market local products, its mission included women empowerment.
Targets set by NECTAR consist of projects in the following areas:
- Projects securing the safety and security of the people.
- Projects contributing to Urban Civic Services and Urban Civic Management (Example: traffic management, CCTV surveillance, 3D terrain models, Radio Networks etc).
- Projects enabling reliable and critical communication at a high bandwidth and that which employs high speeds.
- E-education and Tele-medicine mesh nets.
- Projects enabling the mapping of critical and scarce natural resources and public utilities like forests, water etc., making use of the high-resolution 3D GIS platform.
- Technology and training projects that are wide-ranging, in areas of bamboo applications across the entire value chain including the growing of bamboo, primary processing of the bamboo to modern products and applications;
- Horticulture, agri-processing, agriculture-related livelihood and income programmes.
- Skill development and training programmes in the backward regions and rural areas.
Issue Area
- It has constituted NECTAR with practically the same set of people, which instead of extending support to the 70-odd units, has started lodging cases against the bamboo entrepreneurs for being defaulters of the now non-existent NMBA’s funds
- One of the tasks entrusted to NECTAR is to provide wide-ranging training and technology projects in areas of bamboo applications across the entire value chain from bamboo growth, primary processing to modern applications and products. But this appears to be only on paper.
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