In order to allow Ludhiana knitwear industry to overcome immense labour crunch, a project named 'Implementing business development services for medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs)' is offering help. It is also taking steps for women empowerment.
The project, which currently is in its second phase and is scheduled to get completed in the year 2011, is partly funded by the World Bank and by development agencies from Germany and Britain.
The Ludhiana knitwear cluster shares 80 percent of the country's overall production of wool and acrylic items. It houses 14,000 MSMEs offering employment to 400,000 people. However, the figure of immigrant labourers has been reducing, which is hampering Punjabi farmers in harvesting the crop.
The new national rural jobs program and similar projects are now there for landless labourers. In the first training centre, opened in a village, around 50 selected girls received training on various industrial stitching machine operations. Also, several motivational programs were organized for the trainees and their families, to encourage the girls to work in the factories.
Around 80 percent trainees were roped in by the local knitwear firms, following the training program in the first module. Of the 73 from 100 females, who have received training so far, are employed at a reputed firm in the local cluster.
In the second module, females who were inexperienced and unemployed were provided due encouragement to work in factories as stitching machine operators. Therefore, overall 170 females have been trained and approximately 90 percent out of them are employed.
Now, the next target of the project is to train more 1,000-1,500 females to hire them as stitching machine operators and to provide them training for embroidery, linking, and flat machine operations. This would prove helpful for the knitwear industry along with revamping the rural economy.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
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