Ekal Movement has set up Eight Gramothan Resource Centres (GRCs) in different remote places in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, U.P, Tamilnadu and Maharashtra. These GRCs serve as resource centres for about 100 villages surrounding the centre. The main aim of these GRCs is to make village community economically self-reliant and develop villages as centre of economic activity. The idea is very similar to the idea of PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) promoted by Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and adopted by Govt. of India.
The main activity of the GRCs is to motivate and educate the villagers to adopt Eco-Friendly life, train Farmers on Organic farming and high value crops, provide Skill Development training to Youth & women for better livelihood, husbandry and promoting agro based local entrepreneurship. The training to farmers is imparted for organic farming through production and use of vermin compost and organic pesticides, commercial crops, tools for packaging and marketing, water conservation etc.
Apart from training to farmers, new skills are imparted to unemployed/ under employed tribal/ rural youth and school dropouts for tailoring, computer data input, tube well and tractor repairs, electric motor winding, carpentry etc. The objective of imparting these skills is to make the youth self-reliant with rural entrepreneurial skills so as to earn livelihood in vicinity of their villages and avoid urban migration.
At one of these centres in Karanjo near Ranchi, as part of Women Empowerment Programme, training for village girls was conducted on making paper bags. These tribal girls were also explained about the harmful effects of the polythene bags and the pollution caused by them.
