Women pursuing small trades at the cottage industry level to eke out a livelihood are getting the much-needed skill upgradation and financial support from an Incubation centre established at the National Institute of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (NIMSME) in Hyderabad.

In the past six months, nearly 400 women have been trained for 125 to 216 hours in nine trades including injection moulding, paper napkin making, carpentry, baking, food processing, computerised embroidery. This, it is hoped, will equip them to turn small entrepreneurs.

According to M Chandrasekhar Reddy, Institute Director-General, so far nearly 540 people from Telangana districts have been provided training under the Entrepreneurship Development Programme (EDP) and ESDP (Skill).

A good percentage of them have gone back and are pursuing their vocation, he added.

ASPIRE programme The Institute received a grant of ₹85 lakh from the Union Ministry of MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) under its Aspire initiative to set up the Livelihood Business Incubator (LBI) facility at its campus. Aspire is a scheme for promotion of innovation, entrepreneurship and agro-industry.

The objective is that the person trained should be able to open a unit of her own.

The Institute will lend support to prepare a project report and obtain loan from banks or Mudra loans. Already linkages have been established with lead banks like SBI for the purpose.

While the NIMSME is the first in Telangana, a total of 30 such incubators have been established in the country mostly in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. More such facilities will be created elsewhere, too.

The Budget for 2014-15 had announced the creation of a ₹200- crore corpus and a nationwide, district-level incubation and accelerator programme. This led to the formulation of the scheme.

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