Mumbai, Mar 3 (KNN) Top ranked B-School, S P Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) has entered into an agreement with the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), a statutory body established by an Act of Parliament, to provide project evaluation consultancy for a scheme that will drive regeneration of traditional industries across 400 traditional village industry clusters in India.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to this effect was signed by CEO, KVIC Arun Kumar Jha and Professor and Advisor to the Dean, SPJIMR, Dr. Sesha Iyer here on March-1, an official release said. 

SPJIMR will provide project consultancy for the scheme, titled the 'Revamped Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries', or SFURTI. The scheme has been formulated by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), Government of India.

Talking to KNN, professor, SPJIMR, KG Karmarkar who is coordinating the project said that they want to revamp around 800 clusters and they have been asked to provide consultancy for all. 

Our faculty will be involved in the programme along with some students, he added.

SFURTI is to be implemented by KVIC through a well-knit system of Nodal Agencies (NA), Implementing Agencies (IA), Technical Agencies (TA), Cluster Development Executives (CDE) and other resource providers.

The scheme aims to organise traditional village industries and artisans into clusters to make them competitive, provide sustained employment for traditional industry artisans and rural micro-entrepreneurs, help enhance quality production and marketability of products of such clusters by supporting innovative products, design intervention, improved packaging and also improvement of sales and marketing infrastructure, among other objectives.

SPJIMR has the requisite expertise in offering its expert services in the area of project evaluation and rendering technical advice in cluster development and will work as the Project Evaluation Consultant (PEC) in the execution of the revamped SFURTI cluster scheme, the MoU noted.

This will assist KVIC in ensuring effective implementation of the scheme with effect from 1 March 2016, for a period of two years, up to February 28, 2018, in two phases.

The first phase, to be supervised by SPJIMR faculty, comprises of four student-led competitions to be implemented by 31st May 2016. The competition as planned are:  Interactive SFURTI cluster web site design competition; Cluster MIS process and monitoring systems; Budgeting process and goal-setting systems; Marketing/brand-building for SFURTI clusters.

The second phase comprises of various steps designed to improve cluster governance systems, product quality and sustainable production of various quality goods and services for a period of two years up to February 28, 2018. (KNN Bureau)