FICCI signs MoU with West Bengal government for skill development through PPP initiatives

KOLKATA: Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding with the West Bengal government to scale up skill development initiatives in the state through PPP initiatives. The state minister of technical education and training Mr Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay was present at the signing ceremony.

West Bengal Government is planning to increase the number of polytechnic colleges to 100 and ITI s to 300 in the next 3-5 years to meet the gap in skill development. Even after the increase in ITI’s and polytechnic colleges only 10% or 3 million of the population can be trained.

This leaves a huge skill gap specially in the manufacturing and service sectors such as iron & steel, petroleum and petrochemicals, IT& ITes, real estate & construction, retail, health care, tourism etc. Thus there is immense scope for private participation in addressing the skill gap, Ficci said in a release.

West Bengal has 75 ITI/ITCs (0.86% of the total ITIs/ITCs in the country) among which 24 are private ITI/ITCs. West Bengal has 79 engineering colleges which accounts for 3.3% of the total number of engineering colleges in India and 65 polytechnics colleges (40 government and 25 private) accounting for approximately 3% of polytechnic colleges in the country.

A large pool of skilled workers is critical for attracting investment into the state. The process of repositioning and developing the West Bengal economy through Skill Development initiatives would require creative planning and efforts to create various forms of public-private partnerships (PPPs).

FICCI would act as a conduit between the private players and the department of technical education & training to build sustainable business models which would institutionalize and scale up the skill development drive. FICCI will conduct workshops and seminars, providing necessary guidance on developing curriculum as per the need of the industry to improve employability on priority sectors such as manufacturing (leather, textile etc), construction, automobiles, service sector (retail, hospitality, BPO operation).