Helping mitigate the labour pangs of the knitwear industry in Ludhiana, World Bank and SIDBI funded project ‘Implementing BDS (Business Development Service) for MSMEs’ has now embarked upon a new initiative to train the jail inmates. The initiative has been launched in association with Knitwear Club Ludhiana.
The training programme, launched this month is providing training to 30 jail inmates to train prisoners as linking machine operators to set up a job work centre in the jail premises.
Sanjeev Chaudhary, cluster development manager for the project, maintained with woolLen season round the corner the linking operations done from jail would provide extra support to industry.
As per project a revenue model will be generated by using half of the income from this job work for training centre and half of it will be deposited in the prisoners account.
Chaudhary maintained in near future the Ludhiana knitwear industry might set up training centre in the jail so the inmates could be trained and help the knitwear industry in fighting labour frets.
Industries in Punjab which more are less is dependent on migrant labour as adversely impacted by the decline in flow of labour largely attributed to the number of infrastructure projects running concurrently across the country. According to rough estimates, the Ludhiana knitted apparel cluster which gives employment both direct and indirect to four lakh people is facing shortage of around one lakh labourers in skilled, semi skilled and unskilled category
Vinod Thapar, president, Ludhiana Knitwear Club maintained the project ‘Implementing BDS for MSMEs’, was helping the knitwear industry in Ludhiana solve the labour problem to some extent.
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Under the project the training centre were opened in the village which selected 50 girls for training purpose. The girls were provided training on various industrial stitching machine operations and motivational programs were held for the trainees as well as their families to allow the girls to work in the factories. Till now, the project has managed to train 100 females in this module and out of them, 73 females are presently working with a firm in the cluster.
In second module inexperienced and unemployed girls were motivated to come to the factories for working as stitc-hing machine operators. The project had already trained almost 170 females in various factories under this module. The project aims to train another 1000-1500 females as stitching machine operators.