Project Vikas, an initiative by Microsoft and the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC) in partnership with the Tirupur Exporter’s Association (TEA), was formally rolled out in Tirupur in the first week of June. The initiative, which has been an on-going exercise for 18 months in Tirupur, has enabled the cluster to enhance its manufacturing competitiveness in the domestic and global market. Project Vikas has helped create opportunities in the areas of market access, knowledge networks, and enablement of supply chain linkages in the cluster ecosystem.

The key announcement made at the formal roll-out was the inauguration of the E-Readiness Centre (ERC) and launch of the TEA portal. These initiatives are being implemented to help local manufacturers and exporters achieve manifold objectives. The ERC will provide technical training, consulting services, business incubation services, and knowledge sharing platforms to the SMEs enabling them to manage and grow their businesses. In addition, the portal (www.tea-india.org), linked to the national portal of NMCC (http://nmcc-vikas.gov.in) will enable them to reach out to the cluster audience beyond geographical boundaries and make a footprint in the global ecosystem.

Rajeev Mittal, general manager, Microsoft India, said, "Project Vikas fits in perfectly with Microsoft’s unlimited potential – its global commitment to close the digital divide by creating new products and programmes that would help bring social and economic opportunity to an estimated 5 billion people across the globe, who are currently not realising the benefits of technology".

"Project Vikas will incubate and nurture an ecosystem of ISVs to ensure continued, high quality and relevant ICT support is available to the cluster. In addition to providing technology-based solutions to our SME customers, we will also invest in skills transfer via our 4,000 partners. We are also running pilot projects of similar nature in other manufacturing clusters including auto and leather," he further added.

A Sakhtivel, president, TEA, said, "As global competitiveness becomes intense, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), specially in the manufacturing sector, face challenges from various big enterprises. With the implementation of Project Vikas there have been significant innovative changes in management, technology and access to statistical information to facilitate faster decision making and action."

Project Vikas is Microsoft India's and NMCC’s commitment to make Indian SMEs competitive. This project aims to focus on each cluster intensively for three years and aims to cover 25 clusters in five years (2006-2011). This scalable program focuses not just on driving IT penetration, but also skill and capacity building, knowledge creation and dissemination and enabling of linkages in the cluster ecosystem. By helping Indian SMEs address soft challenges, Project Vikas enables this crucial sector of the economy to realise its true potential.