India to be a major design hub

Union Minister lays foundation for NID HyderabadA Hyderabad: Union Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma laid the foundation stone of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Hyderabad on Saturday. NID is coming up on 30 acres of land in University of Hyderabad campus and is being built at a cost of Rs 155 crore. It is expected to offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses from 2015 academic year for 500 students. Human Resource Development Minister MM Pallam Raju and Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy were among those who attended the ceremony. NID Hyderabad will be the fourth NID campus in the country. The institute was established in Ahmedabad in 1961 and has its campuses in Gandhinagar and Bangalore, offering graduate and postgraduate diploma courses in 18 disciplines. NID Hyderabad is one among the four NIDs being set up under the national design policy of 2007. The Minister on Wednesday laid the foundation stone for the second NID in Haryana's Kurukshetra district. Sharma said that two more NIDs were planned in Jorhat (Assam) and Bhopal to cater to the students of the respective regions. The institute will help the student community in shaping their career in the most creative sectors and is also expected to benefit the industry to improve their quality of products. NID is useful to a broad spectrum, ranging from industrially mass produced good to handicrafts, handlooms and skill oriented artisan communities like potters, painters, weavers, carpenters, leather, brass, silver craftsmen. The Minister said that the government aimed to make India a major design hub for exports by producing 15,000 top engineers in five years. "Finland has 145 designers per million population, Japan 90 per million whereas India has a dismal two designers per million population. This needs to change in the next five years and we should aim to create a pool of 15,000 top designers. India should eventually become an outsourcing hub for designers," Sharma said. He called for weaving in a philosophy of design into education and building linkages with education system. Sharma pointed out that the national design policy was announced with the aim of building on traditional knowledge skills and capabilities and to ensure that our shop floor workers, craftsmen and artisans become equal partners in manufacture of innovative products and contemporisation of traditional crafts". The Minister said that the World Pharma Trade Centre would soon be set up at Hyderabad keeping in view the large presence of pharmaceutical companies and research institutions in and around the city. He also said that Indian Institute of Foreign Trade would also come up soon at Visakhapatnam with the aim of creating a pool of trained manpower to deal with foreign trade. The foundation stone will also be laid for a new footwear design and development institute at Hyderabad in the next month.