Textile-apparel sector value chain has over 10 crore people already associated with it, and in the past, three quarters alone over 1 lakh jobs were added in the sector despite the slowdown of manufacturing sector and employment market. Apparel sector provided the bulk of the additional jobs. In the next 5-7 years, the industry has the capacity to provide employment to over 50-75 lakh people. The focus is to provide rapid vocational training and make available skilled youth and women to the growing apparel export sectors, which face severe skill deficit and attrition.
ATDCs objective has been clearly stated in this context as "Imparting Skills, Improving Lives". Linking the employment seeking youth to prospective employers and ensuring that they get wage or self-employment is a major endeavour for ATDC. ATDC has about 190 centres in 23 states and 85 cities and have trained over 100,000 people in less than three years under Integrated Skill Development Scheme (ISDS), MOT, GOI through the Skills for Manufacturing of Apparel through Research & Training (SMART) centres set up specially for implementation of the training programme and over 12,000 candidates under long-term programmes through ATDC vocational institutes.
The Skilling & Upskilling journey by ATDC having a massive target of 250,000 candidates in five years has been showcased in Hunar ki Hunkar- Exhibition-cum-display.