Empowering Inmates With Skill-Sets

Centre of Excellence in fabrication at Trichy Central Prison planned

Plans are, to establish production unit after training 50 prisoners

CII has launched income-generation activities in the Trichy Central Prison and the Women’s Sub-Jail earlier this week. A request was made to industries by the Inspector General of Prisons, Tamil Nadu, for playing an important role in prison reforms through empowering inmates with skill-sets to lead respectable lives after their release.

Earlier this year the Inspector General of Prisons expressed the department’s keenness to join hands with the industries to transform the lives of inmates by making their latent talents surface.

At the women’s sub-jail, the inmates would be trained in gem-cutting by an expert from the gem and jewellery association. CII is aiming to revive the gem cutting industry for which Trichy was once famous for and a few machines have been installed in the sub-jail. The inmates would be entitled to stipend for attending the training. After training 50 inmates CII would establish a production unit. Subsequently, the inmates would be trained in the making of sanitary napkins, minor millets and pickles. The products they make would be patronised by educational institutions.

Likewise, at the Tiruchi Central Prison, the idea of CII was to establish a Centre of Excellence in fabrication with support from BHEL Small Industries Association. After training interested inmates in welding, fitting and grinding, CII would explore scope for outsourcing jobs for the inmates. After their release, CII would prevail upon fabrication industries that are pre-dominant in Trichy to absorb them as regular employees. Faculties from the MAM Group of Institutions carried out the feasibility study for starting income generation activities for jail inmates.

Nawas Meeran, CII Southern Region Deputy Chairman, visited the Central Prison and the sub-jail along with the Trichy Zone Chairperson, Rani Muralidharan, for launching the training programmes in fabrication and gem-cutting in the men’s and women’s prisons respectively, as a Corporate Social Responsibility initiative. They were accompanied by the DIG of Prisons R. Duraisamy, Superintendent of Prisons D. Palani and Women’s sub-jail In-Charge Parmila.

Q4 GDP Growth Figures at 4.8%

The Q4 GDP growth figures at 4.8 percent is disappointing, but on expected lines.

With no visible pick up in any key levers of the economy, the situation remains grim. Demand in the system is weak with low levels of consumption, government expenditure and investments. While the fiscal deficit situation would not allow government expenditure to go up, every means need to be explored for raising consumption and investment demand.

CII has been advocating further easing of the monetary policy with a reduction in repo rate and CRR. In addition procedural easing is required to get stalled investment projects in to the implementation stage. The Cabinet Committee on Investments has been looking at clearing tranches of Rs 1000 crore plus projects, however, a similar thrust is required for projects at the state level and also for sub Rs 1000 crore projects in the manufacturing domain.

CII looks forward to some movement on issues such as assured coal linkages for the power sector, promoting competition in the mining sector, ensuring fast implementation of projects, reducing subsidies, among others, many of which require non-legislative action in the election year.

Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII

Jaipur on Singapore’s Priority List for Investments

“The development and growth of Jaipur is a positive sign for attracting investments from Singapore”, Kah Mei Chan, First Secretary (Economics) in the Singapore High Commission

There is a vast scope for tie up in the education sector, with emerging opportunities for exchange programmes and joint ventures between universities and colleges.

International Enterprise-Singapore must be introduced to a greater number of entrepreneurs and partnership of Singapore companies with their Indian counterparts facilitated in the sectors such as real estate, infrastructure, technology business, information & communication technology, lifestyle, education and healthcare.

Ms Chan said that Singapore was focusing on tier-two cities for investments in India; and Jaipur was on the priority list because of its peaceful atmosphere with no security concerns.

It was pointed out that the IE-Singapore encourages big traders across sectors like minerals, metals, agri-commodities, jewellery, textiles, electronics and automotive to set up their regional trading operations in Singapore and increase their cross-border trade.

CII had organised an interactive session with the Singapore representatives on Wednesday, where the participants described Singapore as an important trading partner of India and called upon the IE-Singapore to encourage trading entities to take up regional trading for creation of a substantial export market. This approach would also help improve bilateral relations between the two countries.