Union Minister of Textiles Smriti Zubin Irani with an overall aim to promote good governance has launched ‘JUTE-SMART’ an online portal to facilitate purchase of Jute bags from the Jute Industry by the State Procurement Agencies. Annually, nearly Rs 5,500 crore worth of jute sacking is procured through the government to support jute workers and farmers.

Jute-Smart, an e-Governance Initiative is a Smart Tool for Procurement of B-Twill Sacking. It seeks to provide an integrated platform for use by all the stakeholders to allow easy access to information, more transparency and ease of doing business for the jute sector.

B-Twill Supply Management & Requisition Tool, in short, JUTE-SMART is a web based application developed to facilitate end to end transactions relating to procurement of B-Twill sacking.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) also decided to transfer the operation of purchase and supply of B-Twill sacking by the State Procurement Agencies (SPAs) from the Directorate General of Supplies & Disposal (DGS&D) to the Office of Jute Commissioner, Kolkata with effect from 1st November 2016.

The Textile Ministry also said that in pursuance to the efforts in bringing more transparency into the system, as part of “Good Governance Day”, the information relating to the progress of ISDS along with State wise details of all live training programmes under the scheme will be opened for public view through Ministry’s website.

The ministry said that the erstwhile system relied mostly on paper and there were bottlenecks in information sharing between the stakeholders, mainly state procurement agencies, the Ministry of Food and Public Distribution, jute mills, inspecting agency, loaders, consignees, pay and accounts office.

The ministry is partnering with state government agencies, industry, major textile training institutions, textile research organizations and industry associations for implementing the scheme. Out of the 12th Plan target of 15 lakh persons under the scheme, the ministry has so far trained a total of 8.82 lakh persons.

The minister also launched a Dashboard for Integrated Skill Development Scheme hosted on the NIC Cloud with access to public along with Bunkar Mitra – a Helpline for handholding of Handloom weavers.