Skill Development Minister reviews reviews NIESBUD performance

Union minister Mahendra Nath Pandey on Thursday reviewed the activities conducted by National Institute for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development (NIESBUD) and gave clear directions on tightening the empanelment process to ensure quality of training partners in the ecosystem.

Union Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Mahendra Nath Pandey said there should be focuss on delivery, content and quality of the courses being imparted by NIESBUD, an official statement said.

Pandey said this while presiding the 34th meeting of the general council of NIESBUD, which was held after a period of almost 2.5 years. The last meeting was held in 2016.

It was discussed and decided by the members of the council that in order to bring transparency and effectiveness to the collaborative training activities, the guidelines for empanelment of training partners need to be revisited, the statement said.

NIESBUD has been engaged in imparting entrepreneurial skills nationally and internationally and has so trained more than 44000 participants across 1465 training programs in the year 2018-19. NIESBUD has provided training to close to 12 lakh persons through close to 44,000 different training programmes since its inception. This includes more than 4000 international participants hailing from more than 140 countries throughout the globe.

Addressing the members of the council, Pandey said, NIESBUD will have to emerge as a catalyst in the entrepreneurial climate that we are creating in the country. It has to support other government programs like Make in India, Start Up India, Stand Up India, etc. It needs to scale up its reach right from the national to the block level ensuring cluster vikas' where it does hard and soft interventions to enhance skill, productivity and income of the people across segments.

The minister also added that NIESBUD ecosystem should eventually move towards a digitized format which supports e-payments by persons directly, access to digi-locker which will have a digitally signed e-certificate with a unique ID for each participant".

He also laid emphasis on development of swadeshi entrepreneurs for meeting the burgeoning domestic demand. He, however, added a word of caution that domestic producers should focus upon quality' and pricing' of their products to remain competitive in an environment where the entire world has become a big global market.