Ministry of Textiles Launched Three New Schemes

On the occasion of Good Governance Day, 2016, Union Minister of Textiles Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani launched following initiatives of the Ministry of Textiles.

• ‘JUTE-SMART’ an online portal to facilitate purchase of Jute bags from the Jute Industry by the State Procurement Agencies;
• Dashboard for Integrated Skill Development Scheme hosted on the NIC Cloud with access to public; and
• Bunkar Mitra – a Helpline for handholding of Handloom weavers.

JUTE-SMART,an e-Governance Initiative is a Smart Tool for Procument of B-Twill Sacking.

JUTE-SMART seeks to provide an integrated platform for use by all the stakeholders to allow easy access to information, more transparency and ease of doing business for the jute sector. B-Twill Supply Management & Requisition Tool, in short, JUTE-SMART is a web based application developed to facilitate end to end transactions relating to procurement of B-Twill sacking. It is designed to:

Ø  Integration of the process of indenting of B-Twill by the SPAs.

Ø  Remittance of required fund by SPAs into their respective bank accounts.

Ø  Rule based allocation of Production Control cum Supply Order (PCSO) by the Office of Jute Commissioner.

Ø  Generation of Inspection calls by the jute mills and allocation of inspectors by the Inspection Agencies.

Ø  Uploading the Inspection report by the Inspecting Agency.

Ø  Uploading of dispatch information by loaders/jute mills for transport by Rail/Road and CONCOR.

Ø  Generation of bills by the jute mills and ultimately release of payment by this office from the respective banks to the jute mills.

Ø  Generation of complaints online, if any, by the SPAs.

Ø  Real time reconciliation of funds remitted by the SPAs.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) decided to transfer the operation of purchase and supply of B-Twill sacking by the State Procurement Agencies (SPAs) from the Directorate General of Supplies & Disposal (DGS&D) to the Office of Jute Commissioner, Kolkata with effect from 1^st November 2016. Annually about Rs. 5500 crore worth of jute sacking is procured through support by the Government of India to support the Indian jute workers and farmers.

The erstwhile system relied mostly on paper and there were bottlenecks tot information sharing between the stakeholders, mainly State Procurement Agencies, the Ministry of Food and Public Distribution, Jute Mills, Inspecting Agency, Loaders, Consignees, Pay and Accounts Office etc. Since B-Twill sacking is an essential requirement for procurement of foodgrains, the entire operation is time bound and needs to be closely monitored. In addition, the system provides for automated transactions through banks to reduce cost to the State Procurement Agencies on account of loss of interest on their funds.

The SPAs have already selected their banks and Inspection Agencies from those selected through responses to Request for Proposals. Necessary training have been provided to the State Procurement Agencies, Banks, Inspection Agencies and supplying jute millers for using this system.

At present the JUTE-SMART software has become operational and indents of 3.01 lakh bales worth of Rs. 700 crores (approx.) have already been placed through JUTE-SMART in the month of November and December 2016 by SPAs from Punjab, Haryana, Odisha, AP, Telengana and Bihar and PCSO have been placed for these bales to the jute mills located in 7 states.

JUTE-SMART is a smart software platform which will significantly ease the process of B-Twill procurement by state governments and FCI, make the process completely transparent and rule based and also reduce costs for the SPAs.

ISDS Initiative

In pursuance to the efforts in bringing more transparency into the system, as part of “Good Governance Day”, the information relating to the progress of ISDS along with State wise details of all live training programmes under the scheme will be opened for public view through Ministry’s website. The live information being sourced from MIS will be displayed in a separate page of Ministry’s website in a user friendly dashboard format giving State-wise, sector-wise, category-wise progress of training programmes under the scheme across the country. The drop down provision will facilitate downloading of state-wise details of training centres along with names of trainees undergoing training in respect of all live training centres under the scheme. The proposed interactive provision in the MIS will also enable any prospective trainee to identify the live training centre close to his native so as to enroll himself/herself for training. In addition, as part of this occasion, in order to utilize and harness the benefits of existing state-of- the-art secured Government cloud set up by NIC, ISDS-MIS presently hosted in a private cloud has been migrated to NIC cloud.

The strength of the textile industry, especially the textile and clothing sector, can be leveraged in two ways. While skilled workforce will provide competitive edge to the textile industry in the global market, it will also be a tool for participative and inclusive growth by providing job opportunities to the unemployed rural youth preferably below matriculates and from marginalized section of the societies. Integrated Skill Development Scheme (ISDS), the flagship demand driven placement linked skilling programme of the Ministry is an initiative towards this direction. The Ministry is partnering with State Government Agencies, industry, major textile training institutions, Textile Research Organizations and industry associations for implementing the scheme. Out of the 12^th Plan target of 15 lakh persons under the scheme, the Ministry has so far trained a total of 8.82 lakh persons.

With an objective to ensure transparency in implementation and also to maintain accountability, Ministry has taken following measures under the scheme:

1. i) Outcome based approach with mandatory placement of 70% of trainees.
2. ii) Towards digitization, a web based centralized Management Information System (MIS) platform giving interface to all stakeholders has been operationalized for ease of monitoring of implementation of training programme.

iii)    Biometric attendance of trainees is captured mandatorily during the training cycle and the data is pushed to MIS on live basis.

1. iv) Aadhaar platform has been introduced in MIS for identification of trainees and to avoid duplicity in enrolment.
2. v) Third party assessment of trainees after training has been made mandatory across the scheme.
3. vi) Random physical verification of live training centres is carried out through field offices of Ministry.

vii)  QR code enabled e-certificates are issued to passed out trainees facilitating verification of the credentials of trainees by prospective employer using QR code scanner.

BUNKAR MITRA -- HANDLOOM HELPLINE CENTRE

Currently 28 Weavers’ Service Centres (WSCs) are functioning across the country to provide technical assistance to handloom weavers in improving their skills. For seeking assistance, weavers have to personally visit the WSCs. As on date, there is no single point of contact where weavers can seek solutions for their technical issues/problems.

In order to enable poor weavers to overcome these problems, the Central Government has decided to establish a “Bunkar Mitra-Handloom Helpline Centre” where professional queries of weavers will be answered by the experts in the field.  This helpline will function from 10.00 a.m to 6 p.m. and initially it will be provided in 6 languages viz., Hindi, English and 4 other regional languages (Telugu, Tamil, Bengali & Assamese).

To set up this helpline, online bids were called by following the due e-procurement process.  M/s. MSD (I) P. Ltd., Bhopal has been selected as an agency for providing Handloom Helpline Centre and LOI was issued on 30.11.2016.   A period of 30 days has been given for making entire installation and set-up of call centre and to make it operative.