SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR) has entered into an agreement with the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), a statutory body established by an Act of Parliament, to provide project evaluation consultancy for a scheme that will drive regeneration of traditional industries across 400 traditional village industry clusters in India.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to this effect was signed on March 1 at the SPJIMR campus. The agreement was signed by Arun Kumar Jha, CEO, KVIC, and Dr Sesha Iyer, Professor and Advisor to the Dean, SPJIMR.
SPJIMR will provide project consultancy for the scheme, which is titled the ‘Revamped Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries’, or SFURTI. The scheme has been formulated by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).
Ranjan Banerjee, Dean, SPJIMR said, “This is a great example of a management institute working with a government body to enhance productivity of traditional Indian sectors. We are leveraging the skills of our faculty and making a larger contribution to society, all of which is consistent with SPJIMR’s mission of influencing practice and promoting value-based growth.”
Arun Kumar Jha, CEO of KVIC, said, “This is a great occasion for KVIC. We have signed an MoU with SPJIMR for the convergence of our areas of expertise to help in the development of artisans who do not get their due share in any economic transaction. KVIC will intervene in more than 400 clusters all over the country and cover more than 40,000 artisans. This will impact our traditional industries in a big way. Students and faculty of SPJIMR will get a unique opportunity to work with society at large.”
KG Karmarkar, Professor, SPJIMR, who is coordinating the project, added, “This is a historic opportunity for us to work with a great government organisation engaged in grassroots work in rural development and also in ensuring the creation of thousands of livelihood opportunities in rural areas. In the latest budget, which was presented yesterday, the focus was on creation of livelihood opportunities and jobs in rural areas for youth and the rural non-farm and off-farm sectors have to be strengthened suitably to be able to create job opportunities.”
SFURTI is to be implemented by KVIC through a well-knit system of Nodal Agencies (NA), Implementing Agencies (IA), Technical Agencies (TA), Cluster Development Executives (CDE) and other resource providers.
The scheme aims to organise traditional village industries and artisans into clusters to make them competitive, provide sustained employment for traditional industry artisans and rural micro-entrepreneurs, help enhance quality production and marketability of products of such clusters by supporting innovative products, design intervention, improved packaging and also improvement of sales and marketing infrastructure, among other objectives.
SPJIMR has the requisite expertise in offering its expert services in the area of project evaluation and rendering technical advice in cluster development and will work as the Project Evaluation Consultant (PEC) in the execution of the revamped SFURTI cluster scheme, the MoU noted.
Effective implementation
This will assist KVIC in ensuring effective implementation of the scheme with effect from March 1 for a period of two years, up to February 28, 2018, in two phases. The first phase, to be supervised by SPJIMR faculty, comprises of four student-led competitions to be implemented by May 31. The competition as planned are:
~~ Interactive SFURTI cluster web site design competition
~~ Cluster MIS process and monitoring systems
~~ Budgeting process and goal-setting systems
~~ Marketing/brand-building for SFURTI clusters
The second phase comprises of various steps designed to improve cluster governance systems, product quality and sustainable production of various quality goods and services for a period of two years up to February 28, 2018.