Jan 11, 2007, 19:13 GMT
New Delhi, Jan 11 (IANS) Months ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the cabinet Thursday decided to set up a fashion technology institute in Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituency of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
'The National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) extension centre in Rae Bareli in its initial stage would operate from a hired premises for a period of three years at a cost of over Rs.122.5 million,' Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
'The approved extension centre would ease pressure on NIFT's existing center in New Delhi and minimise the regional mismatch between the number of seats available and the number of applicants based on the present locations of NIFT centres,' he said.
'After the approval, necessary steps would be taken to operationlise the extension centre from the academic session 2007-08,' he added.
The NIFT was set up by the textile ministry in 1986 as an autonomous society fully funded and supported by the government as a national level institute to prepare and train professionals to meet the challenges of the dynamic global market in promoting India's exports in textiles, garments, lifestyle products and other fashion goods, Chidambaram said.
NIFT has been running full-time diploma programmes through its seven centres located at New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gandhinagar and Bangalore, the minister said.
© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service
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