Govt issues fresh affiliation norms for ITIs

The government has introduced new affiliation norms for over 13,000 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) across the country to reinvigorate their ecosystem towards ensuring strict compliance to curb the mushrooming of unauthorised institutes.
The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) has introduced new affiliation/ accreditation norms by emphasising on its qualitative aspect.
These over 13,000 ITIs offer hands-on technical and skill training churning out a large number of employable youth.
"The new norms aim to ensure that the procedural and civil norms are strictly adhered to in all the existing and new ITIs to curb the mushrooming of unauthorised institutes across India and to improve the overall quality of these institutes," an official statement said.

In the new affiliation norms, the civil and infrastructural requirements have been majorly overhauled. The minimum requirement for building ITIs has been reduced.
Besides, application and assessment stage for ITIs has also been made digital to simplify the process. The contenders can apply and receive acknowledgement online.

As per the new norms, an ITI can be set up with 4 trades and the minimum plot size will be around 1 acre to accommodate all technical requirements.
The land lease period has also been reduced to 10 years to assist entrepreneurs aspiring to enter the long-term training space.
The norms prescribe stringent physical inspection of infrastructure and machinery will be done by an expert committee.

"These new affiliation norms supersede all the previous civil and procedural norms for affiliating ITIs under the aegis of National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT)," said the statement.
"These norms will be applicable for new proposals from academic session 2018-19 and accordingly, arrangement is being made to invite new proposals for ITIs on a IT based platform, which would be soon notified," said the government.
While designing these norms, efforts were made to standardise the civil infrastructure of ITIs so that the institutes across the country have similar buildings and facilities, it said.
The procedure for seeking affiliation has also been redefined to make it simpler and transparent, by dividing it in a 3-stage process i.e. 1st stage: Desktop Assessment, 2nd stage: Civil Infrastructure Assessment, 3rd stage: Equipment, power, IT lab and other Infrastructure Assessment.

The affiliation and procedural norms for Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) have been revised by NCVT in consultation with the expert committees, trade experts, industry, academia and the state governments specially to improve training in unserved blocks of the country.
There are 13,912 (as on 30 Oct 2017) ITIs across the country fulfilling the vocational needs across various sectors.