PASIGHAT, 11 Jul: A 22-member student delegation from the Arunachal Pradesh University (APU) here in East Siang district was taken on a study visit to the NITI Aayog in New Delhi on Friday.

APU’s students thereby became the first student group in the country to be granted an official study visit to the NITI Aayog, India’s premier policy think tank.

The delegation, accompanied by faculty escort Ngurang Mana and staff member Jumkar Nada, took part in an interactive session at the NITI Aayog headquarters. The session was chaired by NITI Aayog member Dr Joram Aniya, alongside Maj Gen K Narayanan, who welcomed the students. NITI Aayog OSD Lt Col Jitendra Verma moderated the proceedings and gave an institutional overview of the organisation’s work.

Dr Aniya urged the students to see themselves as partners in implementing government welfare schemes once they return home.

She said that the NITI Aayog’s constant endeavour is to make the life of every citizen better, and that while policymakers work round the clock to design these schemes, taking them to the grassroots requires the cooperation of citizens themselves.

She reminded the students that the schemes now running across Arunachal have not come about overnight but are the result of considerable sacrifice, and that the task of ensuring they reach villages now rests with the people, including the students themselves.

Later, the delegation was taken to the state-of-the-art Viksit Bharat strategy room, where they explored live digital governance portals and were given a detailed overview of the ‘lighthouse model’, a framework used to identify and scale up successful governance innovations across states, the APU informed in a release.