Bihar is predominantly agrarian with a vast majority of its population living in rural areas .

A sizeable number of these rural hamlets are of the Dalits and Mahadalits. Historically, Dalits have been the direct or indirect recipients of social injustice taking place in Bihar.

Dalits mainly depend on local Panchayats for their development but the ground realities speak something different.

It is a fact that vested interests and the dominant communities manipulate the Dalits for personal interest and political gain. Generally they take advantage of the powerlessness of the Dalits, and instead of helping them to develop, misuse their power, loot their facilities and spoil their plans of development.

Dalit people are far away from the mainstream of education, receiving government facilities, enjoying their rights, demanding justice, presenting community problems and so on. There are dozens of government facilities dedicated to SC/ST people but dalits of Bihar are suffering like anything for the last several decades.

Realizing the emerging need of leadership among Dalits and awareness on Panchayati Raj System, Bihar Dalit Vikas Samiti organised a three days workshop for the youth leaders of 20 Panchayat youth resource centres particularly on the ways of helping Panchayat leaders to prepare a proper Panchayat development plan.

BDVS has realized that Dalit youths must represent their communities during preparing Panchayat development plan. Actually due to their ignorance/ lack of scope/ negligence often their problems remain unsolved. Dalit youths must know the process of Gram Panchayat Development Plan and their role in preparing GPDP.

In the training, BDVS tried to facilitate youth leaders to learn about Panchayat development plan along with ways of assessing the status of government welfare facilities, understanding problems, and ways of identifying exact problems, prioritizing issues, ways of drawing problem solutions and resource mapping.

It was an action-packed workshop with lots of group discussions and demonstrations. At least 45 youth leaders from different Panchayats had participated. They learn and prepared the sample plans for their respective panchayats.

This workshop was designed by Fr. Anto Joseph SJ (director) and facilitated by Mr. Sinaya Sundar Nayak, Sanjeet Kumar and Mr. Umesh Manjhi. At least 25% sessions were designed for theory classes and 75% sessions were designed for practical sessions. All the participants had actively participated in all sessions and the feedback was really pleasing.