Since its inception in 1991, Bala Vikasa, an NGO established in the city of Warangal, Telangana has been pioneering Community-Driven Development (CDD) initiatives across sectors like women empowerment, sustainable agriculture, safe water, water conservation, health, sanitation, quality education, and building model communities with great success while garnering popularity at the grassroots.

Capacity Building of community members, on the proposed goals and objectives of the development interventions and their roles and responsibilities in achieving them, is understood to be of paramount importance for community participation to be optimal, real, and sustainable. Therefore, great emphasis was laid on building knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the grassroots communities to help them play an active role in defining and shaping their own development, in all Community-Driven Development Programs of Bala Vikasa.

Awareness and Motivation meetings, Capacity Building sessions, and Technical trainings for communities and committee members were and are fixed components of all programs under ‘Building Communities before Building Projects’ approach. However, as Bala Vikasa was nearing the completion of a decade in development, it was realized that a lot more needs to be done in relation to Capacity Building of stakeholders, both communities as well as development professionals, including the staff of Bala Vikasa.

Bala Vikasa’s leadership strongly felt the need for a much more intensive and systemic capacity building of development agents beyond the conditions and constraints of specific project commitments. A specialized training center focused on continuous capacity building of development agents was understood to be of critical importance to ensure that they are equipped with necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes and can remain as change agents to sustain the results.

That is how the Bala Vikasa People Development Training Center (PDTC) was born. The knowledge, experience and expertise of Bala Vikasa is shared with other development organizations and practitioners so that the development sector, by and large, can benefit from such an effort – ultimately leading to optimal results and consequently to greater social impact and sustainable development.