GJEPC to Set Up Common Facility Centre for Jewellery Makers in Coimbatore

Coimbatore: The Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) is setting up a ‘common facility centre’ (CFC) for jewellery manufacturers in the city. The centre, the first for gold jewellery in the country, is being sponsored by the union ministry of commerce and industry under ‘Ratna Abhushan Suvidha Kendra’, a GJEPC project.

GJEPC has already established CFCs for diamond jewellery in Visnagar, Palanpur, Amreli and Junagadh. GJEPC said that it is planning to set up CFCs in Delhi, Kolkata, Jaipur and Hyderabad during 2019-20. “In the absence of CFC, most of the units in the proposed locations are operating on smaller scale and are mainly engaged in job work activities,” the council said. “It is difficult for them to invest in cost intensive equipment or machinery on their own. Even if they install it, machinery is not effectively utilised in terms of its optimum capacity due to small volume of the work they deal with,” GJEPC stated.

“Non-availability of the state-of-the-art equipment resulted in lower productivity, less yield and inferior quality of finished jewellery. Further, sometimes it becomes difficult to deliver finished product on time due to high dependence on artisans. Availability of skilled labour, as per requirements, in remote areas is a major issue,” the council said.

“CFCs help us march forward in our quest to be the ‘Jeweller to the World’ and achieve our ambition of $75 billion of gem and jewellery exports (annually),” union commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu said while addressing the jewellers in the city through video conference.

“Coimbatore is a major export cluster. The CFC initiative will help in increasing productivity and improving the quality of the finished goods with better yield,” a GJEPC spokesperson said. “Production loss is one of the main issues in jewellery manufacturing. The machinery that would be installed in the CFC would give better quality and reduce production loss,” he said.

“CFC will give a huge boost in production and quality of manufacturing jewellery by giving access of modern machines to small units in and around Coimbatore,” the spokesperson said. Jewellers would be able to utilise the CFC for a fee, he said.

Courtesy: ET Retail.com