Aug 5, 2020
India’s diverse agro-climatic conditions supporting the production of food ingredients in bulk and the availability of promising infrastructure – these are the two key factors that helped the Indian food processing industry to become the world’s fifth-largest.
Currently, the food processing industry in India accounts for approx. 32% of India’s food market, and nearly 11.6% share of employment in the domestic food industry. The industry is experiencing a favorable growth climate in terms of the availability of raw materials, which is evident from the fact that during the period 2015-2019 the Indian food and beverage industry witnessed revenue growth of about 13.41 per cent. Rising per capita income and increasing people’s living standards further drive the growth of India’s food processing industry.
The food processing industry has been of enormous significance as it provides vital linkages and synergies that promote the two pillars of the economy, i.e. agriculture and processing industry and FICSI is unreservedly working towards strengthening these pillars by bridging skill gaps prevailing in the food processing sector.
FICSI is focusing on developing the requisite skills in the processing sector by providing extensive training to people who are willing to work in the food processing sector under several schemes. The Council is also implementing standards, training, and Accreditation & Reward (PMKVY) schemes of the Government of India. Under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) Scheme, FICSI has introduced the training programme in affiliated institutes as well such as;
Training of Trainers (ToT) assigned by National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), whose primary objective is to introduce the trainer to the skilling ecosystem and keep them up to date with the changing landscape of training in the country and Training of Assessors program that will impart skills that help an assessor to undertake competency based summative assessment.
The industry has been and will always be ahead of academia in terms of technology and processes because it’s in the industry shop floors and offices, the technology disruptions and adoption is happening all around. Therefore, the onus is on us to stay engaged with academia by jointly developing curriculum, training and mentoring faculty/students which gives the industry a fair chance to holistically help the country’s economy grow.
The food processing sector, being a large industry in terms of scale and scope, fosters a surprising number of small and medium-sized enterprises. Comprising both small and medium-size businesses, registered or unregistered ones are flourishing in India, making up a staggering 95% of the country’s overall industrial units. Therefore Food processing industry plays a vital role in these enterprises. The food industry has always been a great source of employment with reference to the MSMEs. The small and medium enterprises are hugely benefited from the growth of the overall sector. But availability of skilled manpower has been identified as one of the major challenges which creates a lot of opportunities for unemployed youth to work as skilled manpower in the food processing sector.
So, FICSI is aiming at generating a critical mass of industry employable skilled persons to meet the skill gap in the industry FICSI is working on identification of job roles and skills needed for each job position to establish National Occupational Standards (NOS) for the different food processing sectors. The scope of this is to determine what skills are required in different parts of our country with respect to food processing activity being undertaken there. It includes generic and domain-specific skills and covers all the major sectors of food processing domain via – Fruits and Vegetables, food grain, milling (including Oilseeds), dairy products, meat and poultry, packaged foods etc.
The apprenticeship scheme also is readily accepted by Large Food Processing Institutions but can become a real game-changer for the MSME’s in the Food Processing Sector. Many industry player are actively hiring apprentices through a one-stop online portal ( https://apprenticeshipindia.org ). All the processes like creating Apprenticeship Opportunities, searching and signing contracts with the candidates, claiming subsidy on the stipend, etc can be done through this portal. For this Industry needs to simply register as an establishment. FICSI is working tirelessly to ensure the complete assistance for the industry in adopting this scheme and welcomes all the queries in this regard to bring a highly innovative and intelligent skilled workforce to forge new pathways for our Indian economy and make the labour markets inline with the international skill standards. Apart from this, FICSI has also launched a job portal to assist in hiring of skilled workforce (https://portal.ficsi.in).
Global market needs and increased competition have intensified the need for a highly skilled workforce in the economy to meet global standards of quality. FICSI launches various programmes under Skill India for the Food Processing Sector to upskill the current workforce on the courses aligned with National Occupational Standards which addresses the major issue of HR skill and capacity and strengthen the Indian Food processing sector.