The Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Training Institute at Manjady in Thiruvalla is all set to get a facelift with the Union Ministry’s proposal to set up a Tool Room and Training Centre in all States.
The Principal Secretary for Information Technology, P.H. Kurien, is fast pursuing the Central proposal to identify a suitable place, with not less than 15 acres of land, in the State for the proposed Tool Room.
An expert team led by Shujayat Khan, Principal Director of Central Institute of Tool Design in Hyderabad, recently inspected the MSME Training Institute situated in a 10-acre plot in Thiruvalla to take stock of the facility there. Though the panel was impressed with the facility, it did not fit the Centre’s specification of the 15-acre campus.
Centre of excellenceHowever, the Deputy Director of MSME Training Institute, G.S. Prakash, told The Hindu that a proposal for making the institute a centre of excellence was under serious consideration of the Union Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises.
The Thiruvalla institute was most likely to be a sub-centre of the proposed Tool Room and Training Centre.
Developed in 1992Mr. Prakash said the erstwhile production centre for electronic motors in the sprawling 10-acre land at Manjady, which ceased to exist in the late 1980s, was developed into a Small Entrepreneur Promotion and Training Institute (SEPTI) in 1992 at the initiative of the then Union Minister of State for Industries P.J. Kurien. SEPTI flourished under the patronage of Prof. Kurien and it had provided skill-oriented training to as many as 10,000 educated unemployed youth in the region till it was closed down in 2006.
However, the institute took shape in a different name, MSME Training Institute, aimed at providing technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial inputs to entrepreneurs, in 2007.
