By IANS
New Delhi : The cabinet Thursday approved a full-fledged National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) at Rae Bareli, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s constituency in Uttar Pradesh.
“The union cabinet today gave its approval to set up a centre of NIFT at Rae Bareli as a full fledged centre like seven other NIFTs already functioning in the country,” Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters.
India has seven NIFTs at New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gandhinagar, Chennai and Mumbai.
Earlier this year, the government had set up an extension centre of the New Delhi NIFT at Rae Bareli.
According to Chidambaram, the Rae Bareli institute would ease pressure on the Delhi NIFT and “minimise the regional mismatch between the number of seats available and the number of applicants based in present locations of NIFT Centres”.
He said it would also meet the requirement of additional seats as and when quotas for other backward classes (OBC) reservation were implemented.
“NIFT, Rae Bareli, would be the first centre to be set up in any backward area of the country,” Chidambaram added.
The minister said the government had decided to give Rs.100 million per year for five years to all NIFTs.
The government also approved the introduction of the Block Grant Scheme for funding the NIFTs, like the Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).
The scheme will “provide further financial autonomy to NIFTs and will encourage them to generate more internal resources, promote innovation and result in an overall improvement in the standard of education and research”.