The second internship Programme of the Assam Legislative Assembly began in Guwahati on Monday with 30 students of the State studying in different educational institutions taking part in it.
The internship programme, which is the brainchild of Assam Legislative Assembly Speaker Hitendra Nath Goswami, was launched in 2018, with the basic objective of acquainting the students with the working of Parliamentary democracy.
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It also intends to enable students to contribute towards generation of valuable research inputs related to different aspects of governance and development.
Inaugurating the month-long internship programme, Assam Legislative Assembly principal secretary M K Deka called upon the students to grab this unique opportunity to acquire basic knowledge of the functioning of the State Assembly and carry out valuable research work on the basis of the huge repository of information available in the Assembly.
“I hope the students will make the maximum use of the opportunity that they have got as interns to go deep into the functioning of the Assembly and carry out studies on different topics assigned to them,” Deka in his brief inaugural speech said.
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Additional secretary A N Deka and joint secretary Dulal Pegu also addressed the students.
While the first internship programme launched in 2018 and had only 20 students, Assam Speaker Hitendra Nath Goswami this year increased the intake capacity to 30 on seeing the overwhelming response from students.
The 30 selected students include 13 from the post graduate level and 17 from the under graduate level of the State studying in various colleges and universities.
Each intern is being placed under an officer of the Assembly Secretariat, who in turn will guide and mentor them through the month-long programme.
The students will also get the opportunity to interact with a number of resource persons comprising ministers, MLAs, senior government officials, university and IIT professors as well as officials from Unicef.
Earlier, briefing the students on the design of the internship programme, noted journalist Samudra Gupta Kashyap, who is project consultant to the programme, gave an outline of the internship programme and said that the interns would broadly confine their work to the reflection of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the deliberations of the Assam Legislative Assembly.
He also made a power point presentation on the SDGs and explained to the interns as to how the entire world is currently focussing all developmental activities on the basis of these goals.