Gujarat is facing an acute shortage of skilled labour in the apparel manufacturing sector and at a time when most textiles manufacturing firms are coming up with their own garment facilities, the shortage is likely to become acute in the future.
Vipin Jajoo, CEO, Navsarjan Foundation's newly-established Apparel Training Centre at Ahmedabad, told reporters, "Gujarat is seeing an acute shortage of skilled labour in the garmenting industry. There are as many as 100 garment manufacturing units only in Ahmedabad with 20 to 100 machines installed in each units."
Most of the Gujarat-based textiles companies are setting up their own garmenting units and this trend is going to grow in the future.
According to an estimate the state will require around 5 lakh (500,000) skilled workers by 2010. At this point Apparel Training Centres like this will be most helpful in providing the necessary skilled labour to the industry, said Jajoo.
On the facility and the courses offered at Navsarjan Foundation Jajoo said, "We have courses for sewing machine operators, computer-aided designing, industrial pattern making, apparel production supervisors technicians and apparel production management. The terms of the courses range from two months to one year. While, the qualifications ranges from class 8 to graduates."
"Our first batch registered a 100 per cent placement this quarter and the workers are getting wages ranging from Rs 4,000 to Rs 10,000 depending on their skills and positions. It is just three months since we started the training facility and we are going to produce 1,500 trained workers every year."
"Gujarat has many small apparel training centres and many companies are also developing their own training centres which shows the importance of training centres in the garmenting sector. We have installed 140 high-tech machines from the leading garmenting machine manufacturers companies like Juki, Yamato, Kansai, Eastman Ngai Shing and Gerber,"Jajoo added.
