Bhubaneswar, June 18: On Friday evening, The Odisha Skill Development Authority was launched here in Bhubaneswar, being inaugurated by Chief Minister, Shri Naveen Patnaik in the presence of senior secretaries, Chief Secretary of Odisha, participants, principals of 40 ITIs, 30 district collectors and training partners of Odisha Skill Development Department.
After inaugurating, in his delivering speech he said, “In the last two years, 3.3 lakh youth in the state have been trained equipping them with employment and self-employment skills. We need to train 8 lakh more in three years from now. For this the Odisha Government will partner with the Asian Development Bank to invest 1000 crore to set up eight ‘super-state-of-the-art’ advanced skill training institute and it will also work with short-term skill partners to built at a significant scale.”
He added, “We have to leap ahead of the present. Three years from now, every graduate from an ITI of the state will be at the forefront of technology.”
For “Skilled in Odisha” the government will initiate optimum utilization of infrastructure and greater task of SC and ST stabilization.
He said, “The state must put in efforts to make “Skilled in Odisha” a reality and must work hard towards reaching that day when the world will ask ‘Are You Skilled in Odisha’.
“Our existing ITIs will be paired with them in a hub and spoke model so that their standards in providing high-quality technical training can be jacked up and thus OSDA is adopting 20 goals over next 18 months under different categories,” said Patnaik.
Apart from, Subroto Bagchi, the chairman of Odisha Skill Development Authority pointed out the three key areas where the main focus would be for the next 18 months – first revamping the existing ITI’s, second partnership with the Asian Development Bank to set eight skill training institutes in the state and thirdly to work with short term skill partners.
Mentioning this he also said that 3.3 lakh youth have already been skilled as on March 2016 against the target of skilling 11 lakh youth in five years from 2014-15. OSDA further plans to create a private public angel fund at the district level where the collectors can give up to Rs1 lakh to local entrepreneurs who come up through rural case study competitions and lastly a change in uniform most importantly.
On this occasion, Nine trainers were awarded for excellence in the fields of Apparel, Tourism and Hospitality and Retail and Sales all heading from Orissa, one of them named as Chinmaya Kumar Patra residing in Balasore (Apparel) expressed his joys over being awarded saying, “It’s a moment of pride for me as lots of hard work and effort have been put for this. We have been trained by an International trainer sent by Australian Government to impart skilled training of International level so that job becomes easy.”
Another trainer named as Priyatama Samal from Jajpur (Apparel) added to this saying, “the training was of a high level which made us reach where we are today and the training was conducted at Armask, where among 107 trainers we nine were the fortunate ones to stand out.”
Rest of the trainers being awarded were- Samita Satpathy (Apparel), Jyotiramaye Pati (Retail and Sales), Pramod Kumar Nag (Tourism and Hospitality), A Santhi S Mary ( Apparel), Satyajit Das (Tourism and Hospitality), Rachita Pati (Retail and Sales) and Debasmita Kar (Retail and Sales).
Along with this 5 role models were also felicitated by CM Naveen Patnaik on this event- Munni Tiga, Minaram Mansda, Jaynati Sahoo, Surendra Sahoo and Anil Kumar Nayak.
With the CM and the chairman of OSDA, The Honorable Minister of SD and TE and FS and CW, Shri Sanjay Kumar Das Burma and Principal Secretary of SD and TE department, Shri L.N. Gupta were also present at the event.
