Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, UNCTAD and the DFID/United Kingdom have launched a Project on “Strategies and Preparedness for Trade and Globalization in India” in 2003. The Component–II of this five year project seeks to facilitate capacity-building on trade competitiveness in selected sectors/regions. This part of the project engages in ‘downstream’ actions, to build stakeholder capacities for understanding and managing the impact of globalization on their respective constituencies.
Towards achieving these objectives, Component-II of the project will support activities that enable capacity building of stakeholders that would support:
Better understanding and analysis of trade issues for developing medium-term sector strategy
Building institutional and human capacities to deal with existing and emerging trade issues
Disseminate knowledge acquired in the programme widely and deeply in easily digestible language that stakeholders and policy- makers, especially at sub-national level take on board
Provide feedback/inputs to the government to enact sectoral policies and schemes focused on meeting the opportunities and challenges of world trade.
The activities would focus on a pro-poor perspective, and would be prioritized on the basis of their impacts on the poorer and less advantaged sections of the society in the identified sectors.
Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME), as Tier–I partners, are implementing Component–II of the project for the small scale and cottage industries including handicrafts and leather footwear.