Hyundai Motors India Limited (HMIL) has already started recruiting students from the Industrial Training Institute (ITI) Guwahati. Several students are recruited by the dealers of the company.

Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, a part of the Tata Group is looking to outsource students for the beautician course from the ITIs of Assam.

According to the MoU signed by Maruti and ITI, the parties will form a joint working committee (JWC) for advising on how to provide multi-skilled workforce of world standard.

The JWC may constitute a trade advisory committee (TAC) for automobile trade. TAC will help JWC in issues related to improvement of effectiveness and relevance of training for particular trade groups. The TAC will have experts from industry, instructors, and student representatives.

The JWC will also take up issues including modification of course curriculum and/or introduction of training modules to meet industry expectations, procurement of tools and equipment, civil work, modification in work force setup to develop the institute into a centre of excellence within a stipulated period of time.

Sources in the state labour department said, “Plans are also on the anvil to sign a MoU between the Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and the ITI Jorhat. The car maker will help the ITI to set up facilities to provide necessary training assistance in imparting the latest technical knowledge of their automobiles. While the company will get trained manpower, the students will have better opportunities of employent and the institution will get advanced technical curriculum and infrastructural support in the future.

Both the parties have mutually agreed on achieving the goal of imparting up-to-date technical knowledge in the field of automobile technology to the students of ITI, Tezpur. The MoU will be effective for five years, and can be further renewed.

The Prime Minster, Manmohan Singh during his visit to the state last year announced that four ITIs will be modernized. There are altogether 28 ITIs in the state; five of them are women ITIs. The intake capacity of these institutes altogether stands at 5528 for long term and 1040 for short term courses.

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is facilitating the interface between industry and ITIs. Dr Bhupati K. Das, chairman of Assam state council of CII said,” We are also looking to initiate a tie up between the ITI and Assam state electricity board for training of the students.” He further said, “CII will also initiate the process of skill mapping Assam. We will engage a consultant for this job. For each district, the map will identify the type of skilled manpower required,” he said. We will initiate the skill mapping study in another two months time. Already we have completed similar mapping in Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Chandigarh.”

During this financial year, four more ITIs will be included in the list for up gradation under the public private partnership (PPP) mode. All these will be developed by corporate houses and business firms.

The ITI is also seeking aid from the World Bank (WB) for restructuring its course module and making the training programmes market driven.

Recently more than 600 students of the training institute have been outsourced by Reliance Petrochemicals, Jamnagar. Sources added, “Business houses from Goa and Haryana have visited our campus and have expressed their willingness to take students from this place. Earlier 11 of our students from different vocations have joined business houses in Haryana. Many students from the ITIs of the state have joined Airport Authority of India, ONGC, Oil India Limited, Hindustan Paper Corporation (HPC), the tea gardens of the state and local dealers and service centre of motor vehicles outsource people from us from time to time. We are now eyeing the upcoming Gail (India) Limited’s Assam Gas Cracker Project. Already we have trained more than 220 students on plastic processing for this project. There will be a huge requirement of these people in the Gas Cracker Project,” they added. “A multibillion economic opportunity is waiting under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission pegged at an estimated Rs. 3174 crore. “The infrastructure project will require a huge force of trained manpower and we are preparing ourselves to shoulder this infrastructure development project. We will also submit a specific proposal to WB for financial assistance” a source stated.

Leading education specialist for WB, Kin Bing Wu, said that WB has launched a vocational education restructuring project with the Government of India (GOI).” WB has given financial assistance to the GOI’s proposal of revamping and upgrading 500 ITIs throughout the country. Already 100 of them have been provided assistance and for this year we will take up another 100. We intend to cover the remaining 300 ITIs in the next three years,” she informed. She added that the training in these institutes has to be demand driven. We will have to evaluate the emerging trends of the labour markets keeping in mind the market requirements of tomorrow,” she said.