VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd. (VECV), a joint venture between the Volvo Group and Eicher Motors, has signed an MoU with two educational institutes, SRM University, Chennai, and the Ramakrishna Mission Vidhyalaya, Coimbatore, as part of its unique industry-academia collaborative model. VECV has already established four centers with state-of-the-art automobile labs at prominent institutes around the country. With the signing of the two additional MoUs, the total number of centers set up in the country would now total six.
The first centre was set up at ITI Kubernagar in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Gujarat Government. The second was established at the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, while the third and fourth were established at Rayat Bahra Education Group, Mohali, and MCKV Institute of Engineering, Howrah, respectively.
SRM University is one of the best universities in the country with excellent infrastructure facilities having well-established labs, modern teaching techniques and affiliations with many reputed overseas universities for exchange of knowledge and teaching methodologies. It has its campuses in Chennai, Trichy and Meerut. The automotive centre would come up at the Trichy campus. It will offer ITI/diploma/degree/post-graduate and doctoral programs in automobile engineering once the centre is fully established. It will also offer R&D facilities to take up research projects for Indian/global automotive industry in due course.
The sixth centre will come up at Ramakrishna Mission Vidhyalaya, Coimbatore. It is among the oldest and very reputed institutes of the country and was founded in 1930. It offers vocational training and diploma courses, with 14 educational wings catering to the varied education requirements of students.
Mr. Vinod Aggarwal, CEO of VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd., said at the MoU signing ceremony: “The automotive industry is facing acute shortage of skilled manpower with the Automotive Mission Plan envisaging requirement of additional 25 million people by 2016. The industry-academia collaborative model has been established by VECV as a pioneering initiative in the CV sector to look into this critical gap. The setting up of automotive centres across the country would contribute to meeting the growing needs of the Indian CV sector”.
The courses in these institutes will educate students on the latest automobile technology covering modern manufacturing techniques, supply chain management and customer service management. This will help students to be industry ready on completion of the course and be absorbed in organizations with minimum orientation and training. The automobile labs in these institutes are equipped with modern training aids like dynamic cutaways, practice units, multimedia training aids and technical publications which are both comprehensive and pictorial. They aid in teaching the students the latest in automotive technology and the scientific way of repair maintenance and overhauling of commercial vehicles.