CII prepares development plans for 16 districts in South

Kochi: CII Southern Region is preparing plans for development of 16 districts, including four in Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram, Thrissur, Palakkad and Kannur as part of its National Vision India@75.

CII is setting up a task force to take forward the key recommendations of Vision Quarter One (2025) document of Kerala with the theme of Advance and Create Together (ACT), in alignment with Prof C.K. Prahalad’s National Vision on India@75.

Dr B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, CII –SR, told reporters here that the Vision 2025 initiative, skills and employability, international business and networking, infrastructure development, MSME policy reforms are broad focus areas of CII-SR in the current year.

CII’s vision documents, released for Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, have chalked out strategies for the long-term agenda for the prosperity of southern States. CII would train 25,000 school dropouts in work skills and modular employable skills. It has already adopted 42 ITIs in the Southern Region in 2007-08 for upgradation through PPP scheme – another 50 ITIs will be adopted by 2008-09.

CII is also training 5,000 faculty members on soft skills through industry-university consortium across the region and strives to introduce soft skills as choice based credit system (CBCS) in 20 universities in the region. It provides skills training to 10,000 socially disadvantaged students under affirmative action.

Dr Reddy said that CII would work for the promotion of tier II and III cities the growth engines of economy. It is developing trade and business relationship between Southern India and Sri Lanka through CII – SAARC Project, CII – EU Investment Facilitation Desk in Chennai is promoting trade and investment between India and European Union.

CII is also promoting SME clusters with an aim to enhance the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises in manufacturing excellence practices, total cost management tools and energy conservation / management practices.

Currently, seven cluster projects are ongoing, covering 80 companies in the southern region. Overall, over 100 SME members are benefiting from CII cluster initiative

CII will launch six new cluster projects this fiscal in Visakapatnam, Tiruchi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hosur and Kochi.

Mr M.S.A. Kumar, Chairman, CII Kerala State Council, said that CII is aspiring to make Kerala the skills capital of the world. With an aim to unleashing skilled India, the CII-Kerala is transforming ITIs together. Right now, there is a mismatch between skills attained and those in demand.

“Many institutes do not have faculty development programmes and they lack facilities to impart service sector skills. We are trying to address these issues to enhance the employability of ITI students,” he said.

He said that CII-Kerala adopted 13 ITIs for upgradation across the State in the first and second phase between 2007 and 2008. In the third phase, 10 more ITIs will be adopted on public private partnership mode in 2008-09.