Chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal inaugurated the North East Skill Centre (NESC) in Garchuk on Friday, March 8. The centre is being established with an aim to train the youth of the state in highly specialised skilled training.
According to officials, the NESC will provide skill development training in the field of retail, beauty and wellness, hospitality-F&B services and hospitality-housekeeping.
The institute is being established with the collaboration of Institute of Technical Educational Services (ITEES), Singapore. For this, the Assam Skill Development Mission had signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with ITEES, Singapore as the global knowledge partner for establishing the skill centre.
While inaugurating the NESC, the chief minister mentioned that this is the first-of-its-kind institute in the northeast and that the NESC will provide specialised industry driven skill training to students in various sectors as per prevailing industry requirements.
Speaking during the occasion, Sonowal said, “Blessed with youth power, India stands on the threshold of being one of the most developed nations. I believe the North East Skill Centre will play a pivotal role in skilling our youth, enabling them to channelize their talents to take the country towards greater heights.”
He added “Assam has large youth talent pool. We want to skill the young generation for harnessing the potential of this human resource and make Assam one of the top states in the country. The youths are not only leaders of tomorrow, but also partners of today. India is driven by its youth as the country has an unrivalled youth population and we must capitalise on this human capital by making Skill India a successful endeavour.”
The newly-inaugurated skill centre will offer four courses with a duration of one year each with a total of 400 seats on offer in total each year in different disciplines.
It will offer a certificate programme in each of the disciplines and they will conduct simultaneous batches for each course. Further, each of the batches will have 20 trainees per class.
The chief minister also urged the parents and teachers to motivate the young generation to strive hard for establishing themselves as able citizens and guide them through their formative years by sharing information about various disciplines of study and their employment opportunities. The state’s youth must aspire to work in the entire South East Asia and other parts of the world by becoming best in their chosen fields, he asserted.
For instance, the beauty and wellness course and the hospitality-housekeeping course will have four batches with a total number of 80 trainees - four batches of 20 trainees each. On the other hand, the food and beverage service course and the retail service course will offer the course to six batches with a total of 120 trainees.
Reportedly, the process of admission for the first batch of 400 students has started from January 2019.
The eligibility criteria for the courses include that the candidates should have a minimum qualification of 12th pass for all the four courses and the age limit of the candidates should be above 17 years.
Further, 80 percent of the seats will be reserved for domiciles of Assam. However, as per the rules, if the seats reserved for the domiciles of Assam remain vacant, then the vacant seats will be allotted to students of other states.
Blurb: The chief minister mentioned that this is the first-of-its-kind institute in the northeast and it will provide specialised industry driven skill training to students in various sectors as per prevailing industry requirements.
Main features
The North East Skill Centre in Garchuk is located on National Highway 37 and will consist of state-of-the-art infrastructure facilities. The skill centre will provide practical training to all candidates as it will have a well equipped domain lab for practical training across the four sectors with necessary equipment. The campus will also have an advanced IT lab for the use of the students.
The NESC will focus on imparting training across four sectors and the campus will have four sector-specific schools with both theory and practical classrooms. Officials informed that the sectors for training have been selected after meticulous analysis of the sectoral demand in the country.
Further, the course curriculum has also been designed in collaboration with ITEES, Singapore keeping in mind the international standards for skill development. The course curriculum has also been aligned with National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF). This will help in providing the students with opportunities to access the international job markets.
Additionally, professionals with extensive knowledge have been roped in to teach the students. The trainers have undergone specialised “Train the Trainer Programme” at Singapore delivered by resource persons from ITEES, Singapore.
In order to make the training more extensive and to provide more exposure to the students, NESC has collaborated with leading industrial partners to facilitate the training of the students in numerous ways such as guest lectures, industrial visits and on-the-job training.
This apart, officials claimed that the skill development centre will focus on the on all-inclusive development of the candidates. For this, the students will be given additional training in the soft skills and communication skills along with the primary domain skills. This, they said, will help the students in making them job-ready with a holistic development.
The MoU was signed between ITEES and the government of Assam in October 2016 for establishing NESC. As per the MoU, ITEES, Singapore will support NESC by providing technical assistance on the campus design and building works, design of facilities in the skill centre, procurement of training equipment and commissioning of workshops, curriculum design and development, training of trainers, centre management staff, supervision and inspection.
With regards to the placement, the skill centre has tied up with over 20 leading national and international brands which are also present in Assam for all the four disciplines.
