The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)’s centre of excellence, designed to enhance the competitiveness of India Inc., finally comes to Calcutta, a decade after the first such unit was set up in Bangalore.
The CII-Suresh Neotia Centre for Excellence in Leadership, coming up in Salt Lake next to City Centre, is expected to be ready by this year-end.
Designed by Ahmedabad-based Bimal Patel, the Rs 5-crore structure is being funded and developed by the Neotia family.
“The centre will focus on development of human capital and leadership skills. It will also offer an online system of education for our 1,200-odd members in the east,” said Subrata Niyogi, the deputy director-general of CII (Eastern Region).
The centre, which has a tie-up with the IIMs in Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Bangalore for the teaching programme, will also draw from faculty resources of overseas institutes like Harvard. “The idea is to address complex problems faced by business units in this region,” Niyogi added.
The two-storeyed building will house an R&D centre, classrooms, a lecture-auditorium, a café, a bookshop and a multipurpose exhibition hall.
“We were approached by Tarun Das (the CII chief mentor) two years ago for this centre when my uncle Suresh Neotia was celebrating his 70th birthday, and we thought this was a most meaningful venture. We are also looking at a facility for guest accommodation in the future,” said Harsh Neotia, the chairman of Ambuja Realty Development and the board set up to run the centre.
The first centre, set up in Bangalore in 1998, was focused on quality management. Mumbai (1999) trained its gaze on manufacturing excellence, Hyderabad (2000) on green business, Chandigarh (2004) on competitiveness, Chennai (2004) on logistics and Delhi (2006) on sustainable development.
“The Calcutta centre could become a one-stop referral point for small and medium enterprises, who otherwise didn’t have access to best practices,” said Biswadip Gupta, the chairman of CII (Eastern Region) and managing director of Vesuvius India Ltd.
CII has promoted the concept of the centres of excellence as a service to their members to enable them leverage world-class thought leadership skills.