ni-msme plans CoE for intellectual property

The central government has chalked out a National Manufacturing Competitiveness Programme. It made a budget allocation of Rs 50 crore in the Eleventh Plan to promote IP among SMEs. ni-msme will be a key player in implementing this scheme, Chukka Kondaiah, principal director of the institute, told mediapersons here on Thursday.

ni-msme already has a CIPR (Centre for Intellectual Property Rights). It plans to make it a national resource centre for IPR to take up pilot studies on various industries and clusters.

"Based on the pilot studies, we plan to introduce a six-month training programme for SMEs, drawing resource persons from outside of India, besides initiating exchange programmes," he said.

Kondaiah said the institute also proposed to set up a CoE for the unorganised sector of enterprise, whose problems and performance have not been charted.

"There are over 31 million SME units in the manufacturing sector alone in the country of which the unorganised sector constitutes 19.7 million. We have already made a proposal to the ministry in this regard and are awaiting its approval.

The CoE, expected to come up by this year end, will try to instill the spirit of organising among the unorganised SMEs and contribute to policy formulation for the sector, manufacturing to start with," he said.