Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (Tevta), Punjab has offered Pakistan Furniture Council (PFC) to set up "Centre for Excellence" for furniture industry in Chiniot to impart technology based training to wood working artisans and students. PFC Chief Executive Mian Muhammad Kashif Ashfaq revealed this while presiding over 67th board of directors meeting held here on Tuesday.
He said modern courses would be individually tailored and covered a diverse range of needs with the common objective of achieving safe and best use of wood working machinery. "Training covers most types of machine from small classical models and available both for beginners and more experienced operators as well as refresher training when required," he added. Tevta chairman Irfan Qaisar Sheikh during his visit to sixth Interiors Pakistan Mega Exhibition had assured his full support on behalf of Chief Minister Punjab for promoting furniture industry in Pakistan besides facilitating furniture sector in different fields.
He said the Centre for Excellence would help improve major performance indicators such as productivity, quality, competitiveness and sustainability and increase efficiency of furniture manufacturers in term of capacity building, productivity and all performance of the furniture sector. Tevta chief has also invited board of directors of PFC and leading furniture manufacturers for holding result oriented meetings to thrash out strategy for preparation of syllabi and courses of short duration for timely training of unskilled workers.
"Tevta has also offered financial support for launching training courses and even will train the technically educated jobless youths as teachers for new training schools for furniture industry besides patronising the self employed furniture industry with a sole of object of producing world class machine and handmade furniture in Pakistan," he said.
He said Chinese furniture had also hit the local industry by 70 percent and the sales of locally manufactured household furniture have gone down by 30 percent," he said, adding that pressure on the domestic industry had immensely increased as other countries like Thailand and Korea have started exporting extensively to Pakistan. He said the local furniture industry used obsolete machinery, inadequate tools and manual labour for manufacturing wooden furniture which was resulting in poor output.