The concept of RSETIs has been inspired by the very successful RUDSETI model promoted by SDME Trust, SyndicateBank and Canara Bank way back in1982 at Ujire in Karnataka. RUDSETI’s philosophy is to motivate the unemployed rural youth to take up self-employment through short term training intervention with long term hand-holding. The programmes are basically residential in nature with free food, accommodation and training where the unemployed youth are trained not only in the skill he/she is interested but also in giving him the behavioural inputs / soft skills to make him capable of starting his own venture with or without bank finance. Inspired by the high settlement rate of the trained candidates of RUDSETI and its unique approach in addressing the unemployment problem, the Ministry of Rural Development which is committed to ensure the growth and development of rural areas with special focus on developing self-employment opportunity for the unemployed rural youth decided to establish one Rural Self-Employment Training Institute (RSETI) replicating the RUDSETI model in each district of the country.
While the Lead Bank operating in the District has been assigned with the responsibility of opening a RSETI in the district, the Government of India has agreed to sanction the infrastructure fund for construction of the campus besides reimbursing the cost of training BPL youth. The State Governments concerned have been advised by GOI to provide land free of cost to the RSETIs. The sponsoring banks of the RSETIs in each District have been advised to meet the cost of running these Institutes, deputing an officer to work as Director of RSETI, providing requisite supporting staff at each RSETI and most importantly to ensure credit linkage of the RSETI trained candidates.
RSETIs are being promoted by different banks and following different norms of training as a consequence the outcomes are also different.
National Academy of RUDSETI functioning under Ministry of Rural Development, GOI is issuing the policies for RSETIs and arranging for training to the faculty of RSETIs. National Centre for Excellence of RSETIs (NACER) is monitoring the performance of RSETIs.
Thus a need was felt to introduce an effective mechanism for monitoring the activities of RSETIs in order to ensure uniform standards of training and settlement rates across the country. This would also involve a systematic capacity building of Directors/Faculty members of RSETIs to ensure that all the RSETIs are brought on par with the best performing RUDSETIs in the country in a time bound manner.