SPMVV Tech Park to hunt for rural enterprising women

Tirupati: To nurture rural women with technology intervention, innovation and make them successful entrepreneurs, the Rural Women Technology Park (WTP) of Sri Padmavathi Mahila Visvavidyalayam (SPMVV) is all set to launch its next initiative.

Having completed various experiments at laboratory, now, the team was going to field to find out the interested women to grab the opportunities. WTP, one of the ambitious project of SPMVV, has secured Rs 89 lakh from Department of Science and Technology (DST) with a tenure of three years.

WTP’s Principle Investigator Prof A Jyothi of Department of Home Science told The Hans India that the main vision of the project was to empower and provide rural women a platform to become dynamic entrepreneurs. To be established at Cherlopalli village near Tirupati, the park will be an incubation centre for providing technology based training to rural women.

At the laboratory, the team made experiments with the extracts of tender mango leaves and tulasi leaves to make products such as nutraceuticals, herbal drugs, cosmetics, herbal cleaning agents and development of natural pigments and perfumes.

“We have tested how tender mango leaves and tulasi leaves benefit us and what are the changes when they are added in food,” said Prof Jyothi. As tulasi is known as ‘Sarvaroga Nivarini’ (medicine for all diseases) training will be imparted to rural women to make products with that.

“The experiments were being carried out in laboratory for now and analysing the results. A survey is underway at rural areas to find out women in rural areas, who are interested in starting enterprises. Training has to be given according to the convenience of those women,” she maintained.

It has to be seen whether the rural women are interested in making products with these herbs or they were already making other products using them. Women Technology Park also takes care of identifying viable and sustainable markets for rural women, training in information and communication technologies besides promoting entrepreneurship.

They will be trained on income generation methods through microenterprises. How to run small scale industries or large-scale industries also forms the subject matter of training along with better labelling and packing methods.

Prof Jyothi said, they have already acquired required equipment to carry advanced experimentation related to food and herbal technology. These include rotary evaporator, laboratory spray dryer, solar food dryer, soxlet apparatus, autoclave, melting point apparatus etc.

She also said, a multi-disciplinary team was involved in the project comprising of faculty from bio-technology, pharmacy, communication and journalism and women studies and also Prof P Umamaheswari Devi of the Microbiology department. The government is identifying the site to establish the park at Cherlopalli. Till then, the training will be carried out at SPMVV campus only.

By V Pradeep Kumar