Noted film actor and national award winning actor Kamal Haasan on Thursday called for an urgent need to develop the skills of workers employed in the film industry to address the shortage of professionally trained workers.
“The federation of film employees and of Media & Entertainment Skills Council (MESC) will be launching a certification programme for those who are already at work in the field of cinema and also those who want to join,” said Haasan, who is also the chairman at MESC. Haasan was in the Capital to attend the Global Skills Summit 2015 at FICCI.
“We will train assistant directors, camera assistants, music assistants, writers, lightman, art directors, audio, make-up, costumes and dubbing artistes,” he said.
The actor shared the details of the skill development programme to be offered in various streams of the industry. Haasan has also tied
up with Ministries of skill development and entrepreneurship and minority affairs ministry under their various schemes to train young youth in the skill set required for various fields in the film industry.
“We have affiliated 100 training centres and have already enrolled 5,000 students pan India. We are trying to bring digital convergence across all sectors of the media and entertainment...The MESC has a mandate to train 11.24 lakh skilled man power. MESC did an analysis and came up with 74 job profiles across various sectors of Media and Entertainment,” said Haasan.
“Media and entertainment is a huge industry than what we assume and the only parallel we have is the IT sector. But, we have not put our energy to good use, so we don’t know the actual power of this industry,” he said.
Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Government is taking several steps to boost skill development. “It requires a lot of technical knowledge and diverse skills to produce an entertaining film,” said Sitharaman.
“You need people with all those different skills (in film industry) and it is not at all easy,” she added.