An Overview
Indian Textile Industry occupies a unique position in the national economy owning to its high employability and diversity of skill sets required in the wide range of segments, ranging from products of traditional handloom, handicrafts, wool, silk products to the organized textile industry comprising of spinning, weaving, processing, apparel and garment characterized by usage of capital intensive technology for mass production of textile products. The textiles sector has the second largest employment after agriculture sector and occupies an important position in the Indian economy. It also contributes 14% to industrial production, 4% to India's GDP and constitutes to 13% of country's export earning, with over 45million people employed directly.
Scheme Background
With a view to address the manpower requirement of the diverse textile and related segments, the Ministry of Textiles introduced pilot phase of Integrated Skilled Development Scheme (ISDS) in the last two years of the 11th Five Year Plan Year 2010-11. Subsequently, the scheme has been scaled up during the 12th plan with a target of skilling 15 lakhs persons by the end of March 2017.
The government provides a grant subsidy to the extent of 75% of product cost with a ceiling of Rs. 10,000/- per trainee. The Scheme is being implemented by leveraging existing institutional strength and training experience through three components.
As of now a total of 11.3 lakh training targets has been sanctioned under 76 projects to around 58 implementing agencies spread across all over India. Variety of shareholders like Textile research associations, private training partners, industry associations, State Government institutions are working in cooperation and coordination under the ambit of the Ministry of Textiles for fulfilling the skilling requirement of the textile and related sector.
The scheme has experienced significant progress over the last 5 years and around 4.20 lakhs candidates has been successfully trained across diverse sectors like Apparel and Garments, Textiles, Handlooms, Handcrafts, sericulture, technical textiles, Jutes etc. During the year 2010, around 6 projects were sanctioned under the scheme which has increased progressively to 57 in the year 2014 and 76 in the year 2015-16.
Midterm modification of scheme guidelines
In terms of the broad skill policy framework of the Government and 'Make in India' initiatives, the scheme has been revamped in FY 2014-15 with a view to simplify the procedure and to focus on partnering with industry for scaling up of implementation of training programme with assured employment. Given the vide spectrum and range of activities, the scheme provides enough scope for flexibility to ensure that a gamut of need-based skill development options received under the scheme. Following are the major modification introduced in the scheme guidelines to make it more outcome oriented.
ISDS reach
The scheme has a wide spread reach with training being conducted in almost all Indian States/ UTs etc. Around 3,250 training centers are present across different Indian States, cities and rural areas including remote location, backwards region, left wing extremist affected area etc. Out of the total 664 districts Indian districts, around 357 districts have been covered under the scheme and trainees from different strata of the society are the major beneficiaries.
ISDS spread across INDIA
Under ISDS scheme, special emphasis has been laid on selecting the trainees from the job seekers amongst the rural youth having educational qualification preferably 10+2 standard. Key focus has been give to target weaker/underprivileged section of the society for the upliftment of their economy status and provide opportunities for livelihood. The scheme reach has been highly inclusive and major stress has been laid on targeting backward section and reaching the lowest stratum of the society. Out of the total successful trainees trained till July 2015, around 55% of the trainees belongs to backward section including the SC/ST/OBC/Minority. Further majority of the candidates trained under the scheme are women.