BHUBANESWAR: The State government has decided to recast the National Service Scheme (NSS) units in various colleges and universities with a focus on tobacco-free campuses this year. At the State NSS Advisory Committee meeting held under the chairmanship of Higher Education Secretary Saswat Mishra recently, it was decided that of an amount of Rs 1 crore sanctioned by the State government for strengthening NSS this year (2022-23), 75 per cent would be used for conducting awareness programmes on tobacco-free campus, organisation of blood donation camps and clean campus drives. AIIMS-Bhubaneswar will assist the State NSS Cell to prepare the plan for tobacco-free campuses.
Calling upon the institutions to revive their dormant NSS units, government asked NSS bureaus having more than 10,000 volunteers to hire full-time programme coordinators for successful implementation of the programme. Currently, Utkal University has 23,750 volunteers while CHSE has 28,600 volunteers and Berhampur University 14,000.
Sources in the Higher Education department said there 31 autonomous colleges under Utkal, Berhampur, Sambalpur, Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo, Rama Devi and Fakir Mohan universities but NSS units in 15 of them are currently dormant. It has also been decided that each NSS unit in an educational institute will now consist of 100 volunteers instead of the existing matrix of 50, said Sarita Patel, Regional Director, NSS-Odisha.