The Hindu Business Line : CORE of textile industry to be in Coimbatore

THE Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) of the Department of Science and Technology has chosen the city-based Kumaraguru College of Technology (KCT) to locate a centre of relevance and excellence (CORE) in textile technology and machinery.

This will be the TIFAC's 20th CORE centre set up on all-India basis under its REACH (relevance and excellence in achieving new heights in education) Mission. The CORE at Kumaraguru College will be the only dedicated centre of excellence for the textile sector and it will specialise in the area of textile technology and machinery including apparel management, machine designing, chemical processing, product development, according Dr V. Natarajan, head of the KCT's department of textile technology and coordinator for the CORE project.

The TIFAC-KCT `s CORE in textiles - a three-year project - will be actually a tripartite institution-industry linkage programme aimed at developing a centre of higher learning and research not only in textile technology but also in textile machine building. The CORE which will bring modern labs, machine designing, textile instrumentation and a knowledge centre dedicated to textile manufacturing to KCT will be funded jointly by the TIFAC, KCT and three private industrial partners to be associated with the programme.

The three private industries taking part in the programme are the Bangalore-based Reach Technologies, Coimbatore-based textile engineering firm Statex Engineering and Sangeeth Textiles of Annur.

According to Dr Natarajan, the CORE is being set up at an outlay of Rs 3.76 crore. While TIFAC will provide Rs 1.16 crore, the balance cost would be shared by the KCT and the three private industries.

The CORE project will further strengthen the KCT's efforts to develop a separate school of textile engineering.