North East Skill Centre to run on its own

ITE Education Services, Singapore formally hands over institute to Assam Skill Development Mission

Guests at the hand-over ceremony: Twitter/@jayanta_malla

Umanand Jaiswal   |   TT  |  Guwahati   |  11.07.22 : The North East Skill Centre (NESC), a first-of-its-kind institute in the region with the objective of churning out quality manpower, will be “on its own” from Tuesday with the ITE Education Services (ITEES), Singapore, formally handing over the institute to the Assam Skill Development Mission (ASDM).

The handover function of the Guwahati-based centre was held here in the presence of Assam minister for skill development and entrepreneurship, Jayanta Malla Baruah, and senior Singapore minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

“We are immensely thankful to the government of Singapore for not only helping us in establishing the NESC but also coming forward and showing interest in collaborating with Assam across many sectors which will be mutually beneficial both for the state of Assam and Singapore,” Baruah said.

An ASDM official told The Telegraph the NESC will be on its own after the successful execution of the MoU with the ITEES, Singapore, the “knowledge partner” for establishing the centre, the objective of which is to impart “training of international standard with quality assurance and benchmarking”.

“Handholding by the Singapore company formally ended today. The handing over got delayed because of Covid. The collaboration with ITEES has yielded results. Our placement rate is around 95 per cent and we will be trying to improve further. It is the first-of-its-kind institute in the region,” the official said.

The NESC provides one-year courses in beauty and wellness, retail services and hospitality (food and beverage service and housekeeping).

NESC tied up with the ITEES, Singapore, in 2016, to address the need of high-quality technical and vocational education training (TVET) in the region so that it could meet the dynamic needs of industries and support the growth of the region.

Those tracking the job market said that there was a need for such a centre in the northeast given growing unemployment rate. Assam itself has over 24 lakh educated people who are unemployed.

Besides designing the course curriculum which is at par with international course in these sectors, the ITEES has also helped in training the NESC trainers, design of campus and facilities, procurement of training equipment, management staff and inspection.

ITEES, Singapore is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) set up in 2003 under Singapore’s ministry of education to provide its expertise in TVET.

The Assam Skill Development Mission (ASDM), formed in 2015, will now run the NESC which has an yearly intake of 400 trainees.

The present ASDM mission director is Ankur Jain, who was bullish about the “future of the international standard centre” in the region.

He said the NESC will help the “meritorious” candidates from financially weak background secure scholarship to pursue their courses.

Singapore minister Shanmugaratnam said Assam has tremendous potential for growth and  upcoming mega projects such as the Assam Skill University can be a “role model for rest of India” in terms of vocational education.

The skill university is being set up in Mangaldoi in Darrang district, about 115km from Guwahati. The ITEES is likely to collaborate on the university project, an ASDM source said.