Thaindian News

Jammu, Sep 11 (IANS) The Army in Jammu and Kashmir Tuesday flagged off a group of 25 people from a town near the Line of Control (LoC) in the state’s Rajouri district for an industrial awareness tour to enable them to see how development schemes had worked in other parts of the country.

The ten-day tour for the residents of Nowshera, close to the LoC in Rajouri district and about 100 km north-west of Jammu, has been sponsored under the Army’s ‘Operation Sadbhavna’ (Goodwill). The selected villagers would visit Varanasi and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.

According to a defence spokesman: “The tour is aimed at instilling a sense of awareness among the local populace and providing them a glimpse of areas, which due to establishment of various employment-generating industries, have developed rapidly.”

He said the selection of individuals for the tour was made keeping this aim of the tour in mind. “Apart from age and experience, the individuals were screened to assess their suitability to grasp the impact of development and potential initiative to apply these ideas innovatively in their respective areas,” the spokesman said.

They would also visit historical and other places of interest in and around Varanasi and Lucknow.

The spokesman noted that “the tour would be a life time opportunity for the members to witness the fruits of development as also experience the cultural depth of our country and would go a long way in incorporating the people of Jammu and Kashmir into the national mainstream”.

This is the first tour of its kind under ‘Operation Sadbhavna’.