The UT education department is planning to divert a portion of the contract for stitching school uniforms to students who passed the fashion designing course in government schools.

This will generate income for aspiring fashion designers.

In this move to ensure the employment of students who have completed this vocational course, the department has asked committees in all nine schools in the city which offer the fashion designing course to contact students who have passed out in the last five years.

These schools include Government Model Senior Secondary School (GMSSS) in Sectors 8, 23, 21, 32, 40, 45, 47 and Manimajra town and GMSSS for girls in Sector 23.

The schools are reaching out to old students and taking their consent for joining the program. The department has asked school committees to send the details of responses of the students by August 1.

To initiate the project, the department officials have also planned to launch a production-cum-training centres in GMSSS in Sector 45 and Manimajra town after receiving the responses of the students.

Saroj Mittal, Assistant Director Vocational Education UT, while speaking to Newsline, said, “We are planning to launch the production centres and get them operational within the next one month. We will assess the success of the program for about a year by launching the centres in only two of these schools.”

About 50,000 students in the city avail the provision of free uniform upto class VIII in Chandigarh government schools under the guidelines of Right to Education Act.

So far, the department had been providing readymade uniforms to these students.

Under the new plan about ten per cent of the uniforms will be stitched by the passed out students who will join the centre.