The Hindu Business Line : Panel prepares new course content in textile curriculum

A special committee on human resource development in textiles that has been assigned the task of identifying today's manpower needs recently completed its study.

The study is to revamp the curriculum of short-term and continuous courses in textiles offered by ITIs/colleges/IITs/Universities to suit today's industry/business needs, upgrading the training content covering from unskilled to management cadres and synergising the private-public participation in manpower development.

The committee formed by the Textiles Ministry has been sounded to adopt value-added textiles, functional finishing, apparel technology and smart textiles as part of the syllabus of textile courses offered by institutions.

The report prepared with the help of three sub-groups is to be submitted to the Secretary, Union Textiles Ministry, shortly for further follow-ups, according to Mr Nagesh Mugadur, Joint Textile Commissioner, Mumbai.

He is also the convener/member-secretary for the special committee, which comprises faculty from IIT and members from All India Council for Technical Education.

The sub-groups, according to Mr Mugadur, have projected the domestic textile sector to absorb an additional 12-million job potential (including five-lakh direct employment) in the next five years with garmenting sector alone providing 40 lakh jobs. Of the 5,000 industrial training institutes in the country, which provide scope for mass training in skill upgradation, only 1,243 have courses that are related to textile industry but even these courses are generally tuned to self-employment in textiles. The existing industry-institution participation in skill upgradation is unable to turn out sufficient number of skilled labour due to infrastructure paucity.

Mr Mugadur who was here on an official visit told Business Line that the study also deliberated on the scope of extending one-time grant/recurring grants to create industry-institution linkages, building infrastructure for training such as laboratories/training tools.